Thursday, September 24, 2009

Caption, My Caption


ROBOWRITER'S ASSIGNMENT

Go through a magazine and cut out all the single-panel cartoons. Avoid iconic characters that you may be too familiar with, like Ziggy or Marmaduke and avoid cartoons that don't need or don't have a caption. The joke's already there and it could be creatively problematic when you try to do something different with it. In cutting out the cartoons, remove the captions and throw them away. Use the remaining cartoons as springboards to writing scenes. A great magazine to use for this is The New Yorker. Their cartoons are fairly neutral and hardly ever funny. You don't have to worry about the caption being stuck in your head, because you'll promptly forget it.

I wrote two scenes this week with the exercise, "Oblique Oblige" and "Climate Change."

Join us on Sundays!

Sundays 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Bourgeois Pig Cafe
738 West Fullerton, 2nd floor
A weekly drop-in workshop for sketch comedy writers of all levels. Come to get feedback on a scene you are already working on. Come to get ideas for new scenes. Come to hang out, read scenes, meet other writers. $5.

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