Sketch Comedy

A comedy show which is predominantly short sketches, often related. Also known as a Sketch Show, it's a descendant of the Variety Show.

They usually have a stable of comic stereotypes, used in a series of sketches, with no continuity. Each show will include a few sketches about each of the iconic characters interspersed with one-off sketches.

Particularly successful sketches may be spun-off into a Sitcom or a movie (such is the case of Saturday Night Live, Kids in The Hall, and SCTV).

The show may include musical numbers or a stand-up act, but only as a minor element. Sometimes, when the various iconic characters are shown interacting, the show may border on being a plotless Sitcom. Conversely, a Negative Continuity Sitcom may be accused of being a Sketch Show.

Compare with Variety Show

Examples of Sketch Comedy include:

• Absolutely
• The Adam and Joe Show
• All That! was a teenage sketch comedy show on Nickelodeon, and had a movie based on the "Good Burger" sketch (featuring Kel Mitchell and Kenan Thompson). One of the cast members (Kenan Thompson) would later be a cast member for Saturday Night Live (becoming the first Nickelodeon veteran to be an SNL cast member and the first cast member to be born after 1975 [SNL's premiere year]. Thompson was born in 1978).
• Almost Live
• The Amanda Show, All That!'s Spin-Off. Featured Taran Killam, who, like Kenan Thompson, was a Nickelodeon child star who is now a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Unlike Thompson, Killam was born in 1982 and appeared on SNL's rival sketch show, Mad TV before moving on to SNL.
• The Andy Milonakis Show
• The Armando Iannucci Shows
• The Ben Stiller Show
• The Big Gay Sketch Show: A sketch show on Logo that can best be described as Saturday Night Live + Mad TV + a lot of jokes about the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning sexuality lifestyle (some of which are, according to critics, a little more well-written than what other sketch shows have done). Erica Ash and Kate McKinnon stand out as the only two cast members from this show who have moved on to others; Erica Ash was on the final season of "Mad TV" while Kate McKinnon will be SNL's newest feature player in April 2012.
• Big Train
• A Bit of Fry and Laurie
• Blue Collar TV: made by the same producers who created Mad TV
• The Burkiss Way
• Camera Cafe
• The Catherine Tate Show
• Chapelles Show: One of Comedy Central's most popular sketch shows
• The Chaser's War on Everything
• Chewin the Fat — A Scottish show and the source of many memes incomprehensible outside of Scotland.
• D.C. Follies
• Derrick Comedy (a Web Original group)
• Dorudon Cosplay (a Swedish cosplay group)
• Drew Carey's Improv-A-Ganza
• The Electric Company (the 1970s version) - Think "Laugh-In" if it toned-down some of the (then-considered) raunchy humor and was educational.
• Fast Forward
• The Fast Show
• Fist of Fun
• The Frantics

• Fridays, an early 1980s sketch show that aired on ABC on Friday nights at 11:30pm. Played out like Saturday Night Live if the sketches were crazier, had better production value, and were inspired by drugs (two recurring characters — Mark Blankfield's Wired Pharmacist and Darrow Igus's Nat E. Dredd The Rasta Gourmet — were drug addicts: the wired pharmacist was obviously getting high on his own supplies and Nat E. Dredd smoked and cooked with ganja). The show had Michael Richards (yes, the same Michael Richards who played Kramer on Seinfeld...and later got in trouble for using the n-word during his stand-up act at the Laugh Factory), Larry David (the creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm), and Melanie Chartoff (the voice of Didi Pickles and her mom, Minka, on Rugrats and its Spin-Off, All Grown Up; on Fridays, she was the hot chick and the anchor for Friday Night News) as cast members. Lasted until 1982 after ABC failed at making Fridays a primetime sketch show instead of a late-night one (as it suffered a time change in 1981 when ABC wanted Nightline to air five days a week instead of four).

• Gabba Gabba: Formerly Yo Gabba Gabba!"
• Harry Enfield and Chums
  • Harry and Paul
• Hee Haw: A long-running sketch show filled with American Southern/country humor.
• Hello Cheeky
• Horrible Histories
• Human Giant
• Hype, a WB sketch comedy show featuring sketches that made fun of celebrities and pop culture. Lasted one season. Included then-future Mad TV cast members Frank Caliendo and Daniele Gaither — and featured writing by former SNL writer and cast member Terry Sweeney
• Important Things with Demetri Martin
• In Living Color — FOX's urban (read: black) answer to Saturday Night Live.
• Jam
• Key and Peele: Comedy Central's latest sketch show featuring Mad TV's Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.
• The Kids in The Hall — a Canadian sketch show produced by Lorne Michaels. Mark McKinney was a cast member for both this show and SNL.
• Ka Blam!
• The League of Gentlemen is somewhere between this and a Sitcom
• Lo Zoo di 105
• Los Rayos Gama (The Gamma Rays) Puerto Rican comedy TV show dedicated to social satire.
• Little Britain
• Mad TV — Saturday Night Live's rival sketch show from 1995-2009. Is considered the longest-running sketch show on FOX and the longest-running dueling show to SNL. Has a Spiritual Successor (of sorts) in the form of the Cartoon Network sketch show MAD and two cast members who have jumped ship from Mad TV to be on SNL (Jeff Richards and Taran Killam).
  • It should be noted that the premise of a sketch comedy show based on MAD Magazine (be it animated like the Cartoon Network version or live-action like the FOX version) is not exactly a new idea: in the early 1970s, a pilot was made for an animated sketch show based on MAD Magazine, using all the artwork for their movie and TV show parodies (the pilot had parodies of The Godfather and Columbo), along with their satirical pieces, like "The Parent Awards." The pilot has never aired on TV (as executives thought it wouldn't appeal to anyone) and now exists as a rare treasure that's somewhere out on the Internet.
• The Mary Whitehouse Experience
• The Micallef Program
• Mind of Mencia: The successor to Chappelle's Show and considered an Old Shame to Comedy Central once news hit that Carlos Mencia admitted to stealing jokes.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus - spawned two sketch movies: And Now For Something Completely Different (a collection of favourite sketches from the series) and Monty Python's Meaning Of Life. Is considered one of the most popular sketch shows listed here.
  • Live at the Hollywood Bowl is a cross between a sketch movie and a concert film.
• Mr. Show
• Mostly Harmless. No, not that one.
• The Muppet Show and Muppets Tonight
• Mystery Science Theater 3000
• Noel Fieldings Luxury Comedy
• Not Only but Also
• Olde English Comedy
• The Peter Serafinowicz Show
• Portlandia: Features Fred Armisen from Saturday Night Live
• The Red Green Show
• Robot Chicken, a stop-motion animated sketch show.
• Roundhouse: Before All That, Nickelodeon had this sketch show on their SNICK line-up.
• Rowan and Martins Laugh In — a chaotic late-1960s sketch show that, very much like SNL, aired on NBC and was considered edgy and shocking in its day (unlike SNL, however, Laugh-In didn't last as long as SNL). Lorne Michaels wrote for Laugh-In before he created Saturday Night Live. It had a one-episode Spin-Off on ABC called Turn-On that was so bad, it got cancelled as quickly as it premiered on some affilates (other affiliates either didn't air the show at all or aired the entire thing before deciding to can it). A second episode of Turn-On was produced but never broadcast (though some museums dedicated to TV history have shown it, often as part of exhibits dedicated to TV shows that were either really bad, very short-lived, or practically unknown to modern audiences). Here's a clip of the sketches that would have aired had the show continued.
• Rutland Weekend Television
• Saturday Night Live — longest-running sketch show on NBC and American television in general (is currently in its 37th season); has survived everything from national crises to fluctuating pop culture trends to rival sketch shows seeking to take its place (with varying levels of success) to Seasonal Rot in the form of cast and crew turnover and fickle audiences who embrace the show one minute, then trash it the next.
• Seth MacFarlanes Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy
• Short Ribbs, a 1989 sketch show broadcast only in Los Angeles, featured Billy Barty, Patty Maloney and three other male dwarfs. Notable also because two of the show's writers filed separate lawsuits against Barty in small claims court for unpaid wages. Barty lost both lawsuits.
• SMBC Theater, a sketch comedy series on YouTube by the makers of SMBC.
• So Random: A retool of Sonny With a Chance after Demi Levato left the show.
• Sorry I've Got No Head
• The Sifl and Olly Show
• The Sketch Show, both the British original and the American remake that aired on FOX (and got canceled).
• The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer
• Spitting Image
• The Stan Freberg Show on radio in 1957 was an earlier example.
• The State
• The Steam Video Company
• Studio 3 is a children's example that airs between shows on the ABC 3 channel.
• Switch — German show spoofing various other TV programs.
• Thank God You're Here
• That Mitchell and Webb Look
• Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job - Sketch comedy's worst nightmare.
  • Check It Out With Dr. Steve Brule - Sketch comedy's worst nightmare's bizarre spawn.
• The Two Ronnies
• Wacko — a short-lived Saturday daytime (noon EST) show on CBS in 1977, with hosts Bo Kaprall and Julie McWhirter.
• Was Guckst Du — could roughly described as the German Chappelle's Show.
• Wayne and Shuster
• The Wedge
• The Whitest Kids U' Know
• Whose Line Is It Anyway, an Improv sketch show.
• Die Wochenshow, a News Parody, was in Germany of the nineties and early noughties the prime example for Sketch Comedy.
• Yeralash
• You Can't Do That on Television, a Canadian kids' skitcom which Nickelodeon imported. It was heavily inspired by Laugh-In.
• Your Show of Shows: The televised sketch show that paved the way for such shows as Laugh-In, Monty Python and SNL.