Tag Archives: sketch

Yeseterday’s post – Stand Up, Canada, Atticus Finch Is Passing By – was about a Sketch-22 sketch that opened the 2nd act of our Season 7 production.

Today’s sketch topic – Smelt Shack – closed the first act of that same production, and features characters who are perhaps on the opposite end of the Canadian cultural spectrum to the Atticus Finch panelists.  And features a video that I am still amazed ever happened.

I’m a bit fuzzy as to the timeline of events that caused this sketch and video to come into being.  I do know that I had a few character nicknames floating around in my brain for quite some time – Upchucky, Stalag the German, a couple more – but had never really found the right vehicle to use them. I had decided, I think, that for this summer’s show, come hell or high water I’d write a sketch around these characters – mostly so that we all could have fun playing cliche “good ole Island boys” types.  I placed them in a smelt shack setting, and got to writing

Somewhere along the way, during one of our writing-rehearsal / brainstorming sessions / gigglefests, we came upon the idea of melding the smelt shack script with a bit about the seal hunt industry.  I don’t know who came up with the idea to have a penis represent the evil seals, but I do know who was totally on-board with being cast in that role.
So, yeah. we thought that a great way – an outlandish way – an “oh my god did I just see what I think I just saw, did they just do that” way to end the smelt shack sketch was to have these characters get excited about making a viral video that would show how (to these guys) the seal hunt is necessary because seals are killers of fish stock.
We’d do up an ultra cheap, poorly filmed video (as if these untalented guys were making it) using little figurines on a white bristol board or something that represented snow.  There’d be a hole in the board,and a seal would pop up and attack the figurine people.
AND the huge, surprise reveal was that the seal would actually be an actual dick, dressed up to look like a seal.
Oh my god. We all laughed so hard until we cried the first time that concept was imagined.  It would be SO funny, SO shocking…  I LOVE that first of all, one of us came up with the idea… I LOVE that we felt like we HAD to follow through on that crazy idea.  And I LOVE that we actually did follow through.  And I absolutely LOVED watching the audience react to that reveal every night of the run.
(the way the stage sketch ended, the lights went down on us and the video immediately started.  Because it was the last sketch of the act, we didn’t need to rush off stage to change, so we’d almost always just stay sitting in the smelt shack set, watching the audience watching the video, and wait until the seal-dick reveal. So rewarding to watch the faces of audience members as the moment registered in their brains.)

I don’t do it very often, but sometimes it really helps to write character dialogue out phonetically, and with purposefully misspelled (mispronounced) words and phrases.  I wanted these characters to be very low status in terms of grammar and education, and getting into their specific individual patterns of speech really opened it up to come up with some really fun lines – lines that would never have come into being if I had just written it in a more neutral way and asked the actors to “Island it up” during rehearsals.

One of my favourite lines of all time is “Watch of how scared she looks!”

I always had so much fun playing in this sketch. Such great energy  It always seemed to be on the verge of chaos, always daring to spin out of control.  But surprisingly, we kept really close to the script the whole summer.

Here’s a censored promotional video that shows a segment of the sketch – Smelt Shack Excerpt