The Comedy Doctor

I'm studying a PhD in British sitcoms to become The Comedy Doctor. I also do stand up, sketches, and short films.

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Quick comedy quiz! Which of these shows do you think received the most laughs from their live studio audience in their first episode? Results tomorrow!

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This is why I love GameFace. This is my life.

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Adulthood is when you stop using your bed covers to hide from monsters and start using them to hide from responsibilities.

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'Naff, cheap, and fake - Andy Dufresne could have tunnled through these walls in 15 minutes with a plastic spoon' - Porridge remake review

*Rolls up sleeves* Here we go.

Kevin Bishop's delivery is like a GCSE drama student playing a cockney in a Victorian music hall production. 

Even the way he chews his gum is unbelievable. 

Every secondary character is one undeleveloped archetype (stupid, tough, old, Welsh) whose only role is to set up a punchline to be garbled out by Bishop. 

Timing, suspense, and weighted pauses have been sacrificed in order to cram in as many gags as possible. 

It's got awful prime time family sitcom lighting - it's meant to be set in a prison, not a south facing conservatory with a mirrored floor. 

Even the set looks naff, cheap, and fake - Andy Dufresne could have tunnled through these walls in 15 minutes with a plastic spoon. 

I thought that at least the dialogue would be razor sharp because it's the same writers as the original, but men who were at the top of their game in the 70s aren't exactly up to date with how young people speak and their attempts at slang and colloquialisms are so cringy it makes me want to claw my own skin off.

The second episode introduces a new guard who is both a woman and black. She gets spiked, takes some of her clothes off and dances around in front of a group of panting male inmates. We can't have a black woman in authority without her getting humiliated, can we? 

If they really felt the need to do a remake, instead of it being about Fletcher's grandson, they should have made it about his granddaughter. At least then it'd have a fresh take on it and the cast wouldn't be forced into doing poor impressions of the original cast.

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Lessons learned from women in sitcoms

Another day, another argument on the internet with men saying it doesn’t matter if there isn’t equal representation of women in comedy. It does.

Comedy is equal to any other art form in how it helps shape our view of the world. Here is how fully developed female sitcom characters have shaped my view on comedy, life, and what it means to be a woman.

Roz Doyle - Frasier

Your romantic life can be based on what you want, and not what your partners or society expects from you. You can be a single mother and an incredibly successful career woman. And if people try to stand in your way? Try a withering put down to show them you’re the boss, in every sense of the word.

Saffy Monsoon - Absolutely Fabulous

Being yourself is sometimes the best rebellion you can undertake.

Geraldine Granger - The Vicar of Dibley

People will try to undermine you, just because you’re a woman. Carry on regardless - you’ll smash it.

Eddie Monsoon and Patsy Stone - Absolutely Fabulous

Being sleazy, crude, and shameless isn’t only funny when men are doing it.

Lisa Simpson - The Simpsons

Speaking up for what you believe in won’t always make you popular, but those who love you will respect you for it. Angry men will try to discredit you because they don’t like girls and young women having their own opinions. But as Lisa the Lionheart says, believe in yourself and you can achieve anything.

Dawn Tinsley - The Office

If you have a partner, make sure it is someone who encourages you and your passion, not someone who wants to extinguish your flame.

Sam - Uncle

Your struggles don’t define you. Sam is a single mother recovering from addition, but guess what? These are not the only components of her character! She has relationships, goals, independence, and she started university as a mature student. She knows what she wants and is getting it for herself.

Denise Royle/Best - The Royle Family

The emotional toll of Denise leaving the family home as a Royle in the morning and ending the day with a different home and name was brilliantly done. Yes, getting married can be the best day of your life but there’s still a lot of women who feel they lose something that day.

What lessons have you learned from women in comedy? I’d love to hear it.

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Setting the sitcom tone

I’m in the very early stages of writing a sitcom

I’ve got the setting down. I have decided on my two main characters and am currently developing them. I’ve even written some jokes. But what sort of tone should it have? Should it be dry, slick and serious? Slapstick and crude? Or farcical and punny?

I’ve been looking at what builds a great sitcom*

*according to my taste

I decided to examine my favourite sitcoms and what I like about them. This way, I can see what types of humour I watch to influence what type I should write.

I made a list of ten of my favourite British and Irish sitcoms combined with adjectives to describe the styles of humour each uses

Peep Show - black, cringe, bleak, witty

15 Storeys High - bleak, absurd, dry

The Thick of It - slick, dry, witty, black, cringe

Only Fools and Horses - broad, witty, wordplay, farcical

I’m Alan Partridge - cringe, black/bleak, absurd

Bottom - crude, black, slapstick, silly, absurd, cringe

Father Ted - absurd, bleak, farcical, cringe

Absolutely Fabulous - slapstick, crude, cringe, silly, witty,

Friday Night Dinner - farcical, cringe, silly, witty, absurd

Fawlty Towers - farcical, cringe, witty, slick, silly, broad

Then what?

I broke down my interpretation of the most frequently used adjectives in the list above. ‘Cringe’ appears to be the most widespread positive adjective used to describe my favourite sitcoms so I also looked at how the others tie in with it.

Cringe - humiliation, failure, pain, inadequacy, shame, ignorance

Witty - slick dialogue, punchlines, satire, irony, charm

witty with cringe - jokes made in inappropriate scenarios, attempting to talk self out of trouble and making it worse, being overheard, believing one is wittier than one really is

Bleak/Black - pathos, pain, dystopia, controversy, taboo, gallows humour, pessimism

bleak/black with cringe - being insulted, humiliated or hurt, being a killjoy, inappropriately timed dark comments

Absurd - the uncanny, the unexpected, uncomfortable, unrealistic

absurd with cringe - finding self in bizarre situations and not knowing how to behave, communicating poorly with unexpected characters, over-exaggeration

Silly - slapstick, farce, puns, wordplay, misunderstandings, repetition

silly with cringe - humiliating public injury, mistaken identities, public farcical misunderstandings, crudeness, drunkenness

What can I do with this?

I think these five adjectives best describe what I look for in sitcoms, as an audience member and as a writer, and therefore should be reflected in my sitcom.

I considered them against some fundamental elements of sitcom to see if they can all be utilised together within one show, or even in one episode. I found the most workable model to be as follows:

The TONE is BLEAK.

The CONTENT is BLACK.

The DIALOGUE is WITTY.

The ACTION is CRINGEY.

The CONFLICT is SILLY.

The SECONDARY CHARACTERS are ABSURD.

An example of a series that fits this model is Fawlty Towers.

The bleak tone is set by the old hotel with mismatched carpets and wallpapers, the guests who aren’t having a happy stay, and the owners who aren’t aren’t having a happy marriage.

There’s lots of black humour content across the two series including the death of a guest, Hitler impersonations in front of German guests, and violence regularly inflicted on poor Manuel.

The witty dialogue is super-sharp, with examples like Basil dealing with a complaint that the view isn’t good enough by saying ‘Well may I ask what you expected to see out a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically?’ (‘Communication Problems’, 1979).

The action is regularly cringey, with toe-curling scenes such as when Basil is trying to convince his friends that Sybil is ill in bed on their anniversary, rather than having walked out, or fawning over snooty guests.

The conflict is silly, slapstick, and farcical, with frying pans to the back of the head, fingers in eyes, and thrashing cars with sticks.

The secondary characters, mainly the guests like the ‘blind, deaf, and mad’ Mrs Richards, are absurd, with exaggerated mannerisms, obsessions with their dogs, or they’re spoon collectors with a fear of the telephone.

This model won’t apply to everyone’s tastes.

...but it has helped me to decide how I should write a sitcom I would want to watch. Why not try it yourself with your own list of favourites and what it is you like about them?

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Throw back to this time last year when I performed for legendary comedy club Cambridge Footlights

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The time I dressed up as British comedy students from one sitcom, one comedy drama and one film

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The 5 Best British Sitcoms for Female Characters

Sitcoms are still a male-dominated industry. Too often the female characters are on the sidelines and are included only because of their relationship to the male leads. Here are the best examples of sitcoms with hilarious, fully-developed female characters.

5 - The Vicar of Dibley

Geraldine Granger (Dawn French) is in another male-dominated career, and the idea of having a female vicar angers some of the members of the parish due to ‘the indignity of a vicar in high heels’. However, her first sermon brings in the biggest congregation the church has ever seen. Her success in her work and her strength in the face of misogyny is what secures her a place on the list.

What it does well:

Challenging the belief that there are some jobs women just can’t do

Starring a curvier woman whose only purpose isn’t as a target for fat jokes (this is frustratingly rare)

Sex positivity - in the second episode Letitia (played by the wonderful Liz Smith) offers a younger woman the advice ‘Play the field. Snog everybody. Sleep with most. I didn’t and I’ve been regretting it ever since.’

4 - Green Wing

Green Wing includes such a wide variety of female characters, and none of them are flimsy stereotypes. This hospital-based sitcom has women as doctors, bosses, advisors, and admin staff - not just as nurses! Plus, it features Tamsin Greig who is basically a British comedy institution by herself.

What it does well:

Jokes about, and references to, women wanking - more of this on tv please

No stereotyping - women working together without bitching, mothers making mistakes, and women talking to each other about things other than men

Showcasing women owning their sexuality and having the confidence and respect to fulfill their desires

3 - Fresh Meat

Firstly, half of the main characters are women, and this kind of balance is still pretty uncommon. These women are intelligent, funny, insecure, making mistakes, doing well, sticking up for themselves and each other, individual, trying new things, learning, figuring stuff out for themselves. Watching this as an undergrad student was inspiring because I was seeing women like me and the women around me in comedy for the first time. Ok, I wanted to be Vod and was totally Oregon, but still.

What it does well:

Showing young women who are as flawed as the rest of us in their own unique ways, rather than two dimensional characters who, for example, are either attractive or smart

It has a woman of colour as a lead, without any stereotyping (again, this is frustratingly rare)

You have to love Oregon freeing herself from the sleazy Professor Shales and making him face the consequences of his completely inappropriate behaviour and misuse of authority 

2 - Raised by Wolves

Written by Caitlin and Caroline Moran, this was bound to be brilliant. A working class family from Wolverhampton not playing by society’s rules is not shown on tv often enough. And you know what else isn’t? Women wanking jokes. And this has handfuls of them. [I’m committed to ending this taboo - it’s no wonder young women are led to think sex and wanking are shameful when it’s never discussed in popular culture, while men wanking jokes are everywhere. And this is about British comedy - Brits always love a good wanking joke. #wankforequality]

What it does well (other than wank jokes...) :

Completely embracing the awkward and embarrassing parts of being a teenage girl without shame or censorship

Celebration of being an individual and not being afraid to stand out from the crowd

Della’s comment ‘It features a girl, Dad. That doesn’t make it a girl’s thing’ because yes, yes, yes [not a wanking reference] more people need to realise this. Things starring, featuring, made by women and girls are not exclusively for women.

1 - Absolutely Fabulous

Of course Ab Fab is number one. It has everything. So many different kinds of women: selfish, greedy, hard working, confident, insecure, stylish, intelligent, vapid, old, young, the lot. They drink, swear, smoke, shag, use the toilet, fart and cause a scene in the way men have been doing in sitcoms since the 50s, and these women stormed onto the screen 40 years later and finally leveled the playing field. And Patsy is transgender, making this way ahead of its time in relation to pop culture representation.

What it does right:

Everything. 

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Stephen Fry on the difference between British and American comedy. We Brits like a loser.

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Research on a rainy September Saturday

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The best of the best - my favourite episode of Only Fools and Horses

Comedies set in restrictive situations that the characters cannot remove themselves from always tend to be the strongest (think Father Ted, Bottom, Red Dwarf, etc.) and much of the humour derives from the tensions that arise as they try, and fail, to break free or at least improve their situations. Only Fools And Horses uses this underlying theme in each episode as the Trotters try to better themselves, whether through earning more money or connecting with more respected members of society, in order to escape from their poverty and repressive environment. Even when they finally catch their break and become the millionaires they long to be, they struggle to move on and are still held in place due to their connections to the community, their history, and the addiction to trying to improve.

This is doubled in ‘The Russians Are Coming’ (series 1, episode 6), where Del, Rodney and Grandad spend 48 hours in their self-built nuclear fallout shelter, practicing their actions in the case of war, and are therefore both literally and figuratively enclosed. The increased tension allows for some brilliant gags, such as Del’s remark to Rodney, ‘It won’t make any difference to you anyway, you go out with mutants in peacetime. I mean, look at that thing you took out on Thursday. I was so embarrassed I had to tell my mates you were taking it to market’ (NB: I don't agree with the horrible sexist content of this line, but a good joke is a good joke, and we have to allow for historical accuracy of a character like Del in the 1980s). More than that, the tension also allows strong development of character, crucial at this early stage in the program’s history.

With little else to do, each of the three men give monologues, telling the viewer a great deal about their character, history and outlook. Rodney starts these off by expressing his paranoia of war and distrust in the political system and it his idea to build the shelter in the first place. Del doesn’t take Rodney’s rant seriously and wants to sell the lead and use the £1000 to ‘eat, drink and be merry’ to which Rodney replies ‘for tomorrow we die’. This is representative of Rodney’s socially-aware, pot-smoking, art school drop-out trope but is made more personal and reflective of his individual character when he reveals that his main concern after war is not the collapse of society but repopulating the earth with girls in uniform.

Grandad’s speech is the most touching, and one of the most memorable from the show’s history. His distaste at Del’s flippant attitude to war leads him to soliloquise about his childhood memories of watching his brother’s regiment return from war. He recalls how they were blinded, with limbs missing and their lungs shot to pieces by mustard gas, and how they were hidden away while everyone celebrated, because ‘courage like that could put you off your victory dinner’, and ‘they promised us homes fit for heroes but they give heroes fit for homes’. This scene showcases Sullivan’s unrivalled talent for having his audience in tears one moment and laughing out loud just moments later when Grandad revealed his brother lied to the army about his age. Unlike the young men lying to get into the army to fight for their country, his brother claimed he was only fourteen but his moustache gave away that he was, in fact, eighteen.

Del’s turn at a monologue could not better fit his character. Realising that the public schoolgirls with access to fallout shelters are likely to be somewhere in line to the throne, he decides all he needs to do in a post-apocalyptic world is splash on some Brut and take the right girl out for a steak dinner and he could end up king. ‘We’re survivors’, he says. They’ll still have their £1000 of lead to give them a step up after nuclear war and decides that ‘the end of the world could be just the break we’re looking for.’ This ability to find a business opportunity anywhere, his habit of always being one step ahead, and his unending self confidence are what have protected and provided for his family his whole life and he’s not going to let a little thing like nuclear war get in the way. And that is why we love him. And it’s why I love this episode.

This article was originally published on the leading OFAH's fansite and you can find it here

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Calendar Man - a short film about a man and his calendar