Weekly Write Up: Goth Ghost Music Review and A Beginners Guide to Reddit

*NB- I wrote this last week and forgot to post it! So here it is:

So, this week we learned some beginner lessons in Reddit-ing, and released our most recent Friday sketch, which was specifically made for Halloween:

We really enjoyed filming this one. As much as filming inside one of our homes is fun and all, I'm always much happier with a sketch we shoot on location, and fortunately York has no shortage of old stone graveyards. Unfortunately it meant our lighting and audio took a slight hit, but I think the setting of a vlog parody suits the guerrilla style.

We came up with this idea originally to film with one person, as that week was proving difficult in terms of travel. However, as the sketch evolved, it necessitated multiple characters, and of course the graveyard setting. Originally it was going to be a ghost telling a ghost story about how scary living people are (hence the line about the undead being the living), but it was difficult to find a direction to take it in. At one point we even considered returning to fan-favourite character Mr Harrison; since he is dead in his only appearance, the only way to revisit him is when he is a ghost:

This was also the first week when we have delved into the dizzying world of Reddit. As someone who has never really used Reddit, or indeed any forum, on any regular basis, it was an intimidating prospect, but also one I knew could be an excellent way of reaching a new audience. After speaking with my good friend Jak (of "It's Jak!" sketch fame, found here, as well runner of the excellent 103 Percent Complete Blog, found here), I have put together my top 3 tips for the new Reddit user:

1. Read, Don't Write

As you would expect with forums, people tend to rush there when they have something to say, and scroll through in a bored way when they want something to read. As such, the best thing you can do is find a subreddit you are interested (for example, comedy writing) and then spend some time reading through what people post and, perhaps most crucially, what people upvote. It might sound cynical, but this form of market research means you can not only maximise the payoff from your efforts but also not annoy people but spamming or posting unwanted content.

2: Match Your Content

Finding an audience who are genuinely going to be interested in what you do is vital. We are always of the opinion that it is more valuable to have an engaged and interested viewer than 10 who will watch ten seconds of what we do and then get bored and leave. Therefore, once you have done your reading research, picking the key sub-Reddits to hit will make a big difference. For example, for our Goth sketch, we hit Halloween, Goth, Comedy Writing and Sketch Comedy.

3: Have a slick product

The last part of making a successful pitch on Reddit is making sure what you put out is of a quality you are happy with. This is not necessarily the same as being of the highest quality; after all, you may be limited by time, production quality, resources, experience etc. The main thing is making sure what you put out matches your target quality for that moment. When we started putting out weekly sketches nearly a year ago our standards were a lot lower than they are now, and will likely be a lot higher this time next year. Remember; just because something is of a low quality doesn't mean it shouldn't be shared, but something of a lower quality than are happy with shouldn't be put out there.

- Ben

No Sketch Group Is an Island

As a group we've been going on and off for a while now, but I'd probably say we've been seriously making things (like our weekly sketches) for a solid year. In a way I consider our effort to be about a year old. And that year has involved a hell of a lot of work. Getting something off the ground is extremely difficult. I always tend to correlate it to working on a band - starting a band is incredibly tough, getting other people to join your band once it's rolling is a little easier. As we've grown and developed our body of work, we now find ourselves desperately hungry for other people to work with.

These guys tried starting a sketch group for years. Genuinely found aeronautics easier

When you start making something like this, everything has to be done by you. It's like you've not earned enough credibility at this point for people to trust putting their time into the project, so at the very beginning, you have something to prove. This bit is a real uphill struggle and that hill is itself a learning curve. You want a cool design for the next transition? Cool, well I hope you can design things well, because if not, your choices are: A, it looks crappy. B. It is stolen (I mean sometimes it's both)

Even something painfully simple like this has to be designed because no program default lettering looks quiiiiiite right

Myself and Ben are ostensibly writers and performers, but in order to display those skills, we have to learn a whole host of different skills in order to get something even close to a finished product. I'll definitely have missed out some, so a small selection of what we've learned mostly through mistakes (and in no way mastered) includes: 

• Directing
• Video Editing
• Graphic Design
• Music Programs
• Lighting
• Song Writing
• Social media promotion
• Make Up
• DIY Special Effects
• Location Scouting
• Camera work
• How much of a pain literally all of this stuff is

Nothing in that list is funny. You can edit things in a certain way to emphasise timing, or an effect or a song can have a humourous outcome, but they're not jokes. Actual jokes. 99% of the work involved is just graft trying to make what you're doing even function let alone achieve the result you want. All those credits at the end of everything that is professionally made, that's because there are people, or whole teams of people, whose full time jobs it is to oversee even just one of these roles. And here we are just trying to sling it all together on the fly. I'm alright on the guitar. And I mean okay. But I knew exactly zero about music production, recording or the programs you use to create it all, and what you end up with is incredibly rough as a result.

When this was finished I was like. "Ah, it's perfect." The next day I listened again, and was like, no wait, wtf, of course it isn't

This now sounds a little bit like I'm complaining, but I'm not. (well maybe a bit). But a lot of that graft is actually really exciting and fun. It's a case of constantly encountering new challenges and going, oh man, how do we achieve that? Well let's find out quickly, cause it's literally just us doing it, and the deadline is in two days. But even when we do manage to work though a problem we've never encountered before, the result is usually less than perfect just because the given task is outside of our skill-set. So if you're reading this right now. We want you. Badly.

If you're somebody who likes making things, get in touch with us! We're actively looking for different people to collaborate with. 

Do you perform: "Finally sketches with more than 3 characters!"

Do you make music: "How well do you know the 5 chords?"

Know anything about film: You can definitely help us. Even if you just want to lend a hand.

Can you draw/design: We're honestly constantly looking for logos and funny transition stuff

Do you make balloon animals: I guarantee we will need something like this at one point

Honestly, whatever you do. If you're another sketch group up for a collab, a creative looking for other artists, or just a person who likes our stuff and wants to be involved at all; we are always looking for other people to work with. I can't count the amount of times I've needed a voice over for a sketch (and it can't be one of us) and I've had to just rope in my housemates to record something.

BUT WAIT WHAT ABOUT....

"Pay artists who do things for you." ~ Artists everywhere

Good point. 

We're looking for people at a similar level to us. We don't make any money from WMD and can't afford to pay anyone. One thing we can offer is a work exchange. We have a pretty decent camera/sound set up and are competent at using it. So in the past we have worked with other performers and in return come to their gigs and filmed their material for showreels or just to playback and learn. We also would be happy to lend a hand in any project you might have going on, that you think we would be useful for.

This for us is day one. Collaborating with other people is just yet another skill we are trying our hardest to get our heads around and this is the first step. An open call to anyone that is interested in doing stuff with us. Send us a message on facebook: Facebook(dot)com/wmdcomedy or an email: WMDcomedy(AT)gmail.com.

Here's an example of some work we did with our friend Jak from University last week. He just happened to be up, he's a comedian and writer and was well up for being involved in something very stupid:

Even if you just have a home, or office, or cool location and would happily invite us into it in exchange for beer/food/gratitude. I'm so so sick of filming in my damn living room.

Thank you

Weekly Write Up: It's Jak! and Impersonating Robert Smith

So last week we put up a sketch simply entitled "It's Jak!"

This was a sketch that we shot at very short notice, which wasn't too much to our detriment, given the fact it is a very low tech sketch. In fact, we shot it at such short notice it was literally a case of Tom walking through my door and saying "Right, since we've got Jak, here's a sketch about him".

Unfortunately Ryan was unable to film this one with us, which would have made things even weirder, but we made sure to get Ryan in some of the flashbacks to compensate. We also worried that it would look silly having Jak blatantly in different rooms during the flashbacks, but then realised that the idea of him being there all along is stupid enough to carry through, and is in fact amplified by him being in different places. Also, fun fact; Jak bought that t-shirt specifically for this sketch! Well, sort of.

In terms of structure, "It's Jak" has some very silly jokes, but if we had spent more time on the script might have some more solid lines. I think the idea and the execution are solid, but the dialogue is sometimes a little functional. The lack of a proper punchline (settling for the ridiculous anti joke "He's gone bowling") does let the sketch down a bit, though I think the twist of having Jak's name appear at the end instead of the usual WMD sting is nice.

Ultimately I think this is a sketch that is funny if you watch a lot of our sketches, particularly if you go back as far as "Moustache Intervention", but isn't the most welcoming sketch for newcomers. Thankfully, I think we will balance that out with our next sketch, which is our first proper holiday special sketch. We decided to shoot a Halloween sketch about a goth in a graveyard, which I think will go down well for this time of the year. It's one of our most visually distinct sketches and features Tom doing his best Robert Smith. In the meantime, here is the only other time-dependent sketch we did, this one being about the referendum:

- Ben

Weekly Write Up: Skype Etiquette and Upcoming Guest Star

So last week we released one of more "internet culture"-based sketches, focusing on how people interact on Skype, as well as how people probably don't interact on Skype. If you haven't seen it, it can be found here:

I hope this is a sketch people can identify with. We have been toying for a while with the idea of doing a sketch base d around a phonecall, but we felt there was more that could be done with Skype due to the character s  being able to interact visually. I also think there is something funny about characters speaking over video but still treating it as if it's over the phone, hence the joke about being on hold. I always imagine when I am put on hold the person I am speaking to is just having a break from talking to me to do something more interesting for a few minutes. To be honest, I wish we could introduce a face to face variant (actually, I've remembered that we already have smart phones).


It's probably also telling that at the moment I spend a lot of time dealing with external phonecalls, and that may have influenced the topic of needlessly bad customer service. I also know that if I were to encounter anything like that I would respond exactly how Ryan's character does and go along with it out of politeness, as I would sooner suffer in silence that challenge someone. Britishness for the win.


The ending was an example of "hmm, this sketch doesn't have a particularly funny ending". We often joke about how incongruous some of our sketch endings are, and whilst this isn't the worst offender I'd probably put it in the top 5. The most ridiculous by far is in "Subliminal Swearing":

Coming up this Friday we have a very exciting special guest star. I can't really say more without giving away too much of the sketch, but let's just say it'll change your entire perception of WMD this far.

- Ben

Weekly Write Up: Weirdest Ever Gumtree Ad and Komedy Kulcha

So last week (and indeed last month) was a busy one for WMD, Last Friday saw the release of our most recent sketch, Weirdest Ever Gumtree Ad, which if you missed can be found here:

This one was I found very funny from the start. Originally the sketch took place in a fridge shop, and featured copious amounts of gurning from the salesman, which was replaced with him being a much more pathetic and less openly perverted figure. Due to us being unable to shoot on location it needed tweaking slightly, and we thought the idea of doing a sketch about Gumtree and it's ilk would be fun.

A couple of little references are in this one. Firstly, the high-pitched "Will just stop it!?" was a callback to an outro I made for our sketch about the Hokey Cokey:

There is also a moment I particularly like, what I call the "fastest fridge close in the west" at around 2 minutes. Finally, the "aw, pwease" line is from an anecdote Ryan is fond of telling that I regrettably cannot do justice in a blog post.

Last we also travelled across to sunny Wakefield to play Komedy Kulcha, an arty night in a suitably arty town. It was a strange night where it quickly became apparent that all bets were off, not least after the first act was awarded a pack of "scurrilous greeting cards" as a reward for performing.

Me and Tom decided to play things fast and loose, trying a whole bunch of new lines and ad-libs (and in the process forgetting several scripted lines too). Mike the unswayed, our current closer, went down very well, despite being adapted from a 3 man version into a 2 hander.

Tomorrow night is Friday, and sees another sketch (closing in on a year now). I've got plenty to say about it, but that's a story for next week.

- Ben

50th Anniversary: Batman, Star Trek and WMD!

So, believe it or not, but both the original series of Star Trek and the original TV Batman series are both 50 years old this year. I say "believe it or not", it's an objective fact, so either believe it or live in ignorance and denial. Also, WMD is now 50!


...okay, first off, a disclaimer; WMD has not been going for 50 years. That's barely our collected ages. But we have now put out our 50th sketch, which is a milestone in itself. We started putting out the odd sketch as early as 2014, and have been putting out one a week since the tail end of 2015. This might not sound like much, but if you've been following our output you'll realise this adds up to over 2 hours of material. That's crazy.


So, what's the plan going forward? Well, we are still going to continue putting out our weekly sketches, and continue to improve our production values and vary our shooting styles. We are also starting to do regular live gigs, with a view to playing some of the choicer comedy and short film festivals in the next 12 months, and will be putting up a "Gigs" page shortly.


We have also started using Funny Or Die, Dailymotion and Vimeo, and are uploading our HD back catalogue to those sites over the coming weeks, if you are so inclined to use any of those sites instead of Youtube.

So, I am very much looking forward to writing a similar article in around a year's time, celebrating our 100th sketch. In the mean time, please enjoy our 50th sketch, "The Methane Show":

A Special Holiday Message

We had an idea a little while ago that we absolutely loved and decided to put into action. It's a bit of a slow burner and the rewards are almost nil, but it's very funny to us and we intend to keep it up for as long as possible. Ben made a really good point when we first discussed the idea that there are some comedy characters or scenes (particularly with sketch shows), that are obviously hilarious to the creators even if the reception for them is luke-warm. At the time he used an example of Sir Digby Chicken Ceasar from That Mitchell and Webb Look - which is a recurring character that always features in a sketch that feels far too long, but is probably a lot of fun to both write for and perform. There's also another notable example I use, which is from futurama

This room looks just like Troy and Abed's imaginarium in community. And is apparently a huge star trek reference

Kif and Amy use a virtual simulation room, and kif makes a programming joke about the process running on 1000 lines of basic (completely outside my frame of reference). After listening to the director commentary I hear a story that the writers estimated that less than 1% of the audience will pick up on the joke and the quote that stuck with me was along the lines of: "To put it politely, [our head writer] said, 'flip them'".

So whilst filming one of our weekly sketches, we were trying to think about whether we could capitalise on upcoming holiday days on notable events in order to get a few more views/shares around the internet. The problem with this primarily, is that an idea like Easter, has been around for centuries and so many of these ideas have already beeen completely mined to death by people in similar situations.

Eventually, we suggested just using the same sketch but badly dubbing over the audio to say things like "Wow....on 'EASTER'". We were all so fond of this idea that we knew we had to go ahead with it and hope to keep on using the same footage for as long as possible. What I'm personally excited for as well, is that our general content quality will slowly increase but we will continue to put out this really poorly lit, grainy sketch with bad audio every christmas etc for as long as we can. Even devolving the actual words said to a point of reckless insanity (Ben has suggested at one point it being unintelligible screams for each line). The point is, regardless of the reception for it, we all get a good kick out of this one. Happy St George's day:

Cards Against Humanity, The Worst Game Since.....Incest Pterodactyls

This post might be slightly behind the times, because the general CAH fad has slowly died an inevitable (and probably hilariously inappropriate) death, but somebody brought it up the other day and I wanted the opportunity to talk briefly about why it's so abysmal. It's a game I've heard mentioned a lot, and hardly ever heard openly derided. I guess criticizing it makes you seem stuffy, politically correct, or just plain boring. You don't want to be the one guy who isn't laid back enough to play charades, why get in the way of everybody's fun? But there's an important difference: charades is great and cards against humanity is about as fun as Hitler removing your anus with an old sewing machine.

Is it an asshole? Is it Tim? Erm. Tim...Tim the asshole? God, TIm's such an asshole. Asshole TIm? How many syllables?

Simply put, the game is bad, let me explain. The rules of the game itself are terrible. The person who is the winner, is the person who's pairings are the funniest. One participant is validated as the funniest person, and the implication is that the other players are less funny than them. Not just, funny in a different way, but objectively less funny. That's such a terrible way of judging anything! What a horrible thing to do! Telling someone they're not funny, is one of the cruelest things you can say; it's like calling someone boring, in that it's completely impossible to prove one way or the other. Even arguing against it just makes you look petty and actually strengthens their accusation. Maybe I'm overly sensitive about being considered funny or not funny because it's more than a passing interest for me. But a lot of people feel this way. Think about how many studies list 'having a sense of humour' as consistently the most popular answer to reasons for being attracted to someone. There was even that whole episode of Friends when Chandler freaked out because Monica started saying that there was someone funnier than him at her work. When you sit down to play this game, you're guaranteeing that the end result of it will be "This one individual, you are the funniest, now everyone else feel a bit bad about themselves." You're Chandler-ing everyone. It's like playing a game of wink murder, but then at the end the winner is just the person who has the prettiest eyes.

The structure of how bad these rules are is endlessly irritating. The winning thing is such a clear afterthought for the designers. They have come up with the bulk of the idea and then thought, crap, how does the game end? I don't know, maybe they vote and one person is the funny-winner. Yeah, hell that'll do. Let's go make money.

Could this BE a better picture for breaking up the last two paragraphs?

So I could go on about how the winning/losing element of it is awful for ages. Comedy is naturally subjective blahblahblah. Okay, fine. But for a game which is about making comedy scenarios, it leaves you with precious few choices. Not in the cards themselves (I bet there's loads of them by now) but stylistically, the types of jokes you can make is narrowly limited. Here they are: Shock,......maybe also surrealism (a bit)

So shock: I'm not anti-shock humour. At all. It's much harder to do than people think. Yes it can be done lazily, but it's also one of the best ways to subvert a joke, particularly if it comes completely out of left field. One of the other biggest flaws to CAH is that once you understand what the game is (i.e played it once), you're expecting to be shocked. If people are expecting to be shocked, regular shock humour can't work, you would have to raise the stakes, go for even more shock! Subvert it and don't do shock, do normal. Then do reeeal shock. Eventually you have to give up, retire your shock, then un-retire it, then properly retire it and become a political pundit for the guardian.

Surrealism I guess: Your other option then, is to go for surrealism. Make a pairing that is so random that it hardly makes sense but perhaps has a strange kind of twisted logic to it. "Ghandi's father was a laptop charger from the Peak District." This doesn't have any shock value to it, but the imagery is strange enough that people might go for it. Of course that isn't a CAH card, I thought of it myself after 5 seconds of thinking and I'm not even good at coming up with random surrealist ideas. That's another huge problem, is that the cards themselves intrinsically take the challenge and the joy of true random comedy. I have a friend called Jak, with a genius IQ (who writes a great video game blog called 103%). His brain works in such a fascinating way, that the random things he says seem completely detached from any kind of reality. It's ludicrously fast thinking. And half the time it's totally worthless nonsense, but the other half of the time, there's a strange art to the construction of these bizarre images he conjures up. There's another article in the idea of "random comedy" itself. But essentially, if your random idea was written on a card, and all you did was place it next to the words "I hate it when....." it defeats almost the whole point.

Someone once told me that if you ask most people to think of something random, they'll almost always say either 'badger', or 'cheese'. Interesting huh?

Plus, once you're even slightly familiar with the cards that are in the deck, the game must surely lose all meaning. You can buy an expansion I guess. Don't do that though. Please.

Lighten up though, it's just a game, lots of people enjoy it, I don't have the right to take that away from them. Well no. Don't lighten up. Do take it seriously. There's lots of other great board games to play that get no mainstream attention, but this swept the world like it was UNO. What about people with little to no imagination though Tom? What are you supposed to play if you're an unfunny shitmuncher? Guess what, I don't subscribe to that nonsense. Call it cheesy, but everyone has the potential to be creative and funny when put into the right position. Something like charades, mafia/werewolf, even snap gives people the opportunity for more independent thought. CAH humanity doesn't allow unfunny people to be funny, it tells people what is funny, then sets a rule system that demands that we crown one person the temporary winner of creativity. I'm not the prescriptivist here, the game-makers are.

This is the end of the article, but it could have so easily been 5x the length....because we take board games pretty seriously here at WMD. How seriously? This seriously:

WMD Comedy is Back. In a Big Way!

In case anybody has missed it on twitter, or facebook, or youtube. We are back in the saddle producing online content again, and there's a lot of it! A small part of me likes to think that maybe there's one person out there who only reads the blog and doesn't experience any of our other stuff, like maybe they live in a log cabin and have the blog printed off and delivered to them by a young messenger boy called Tim-Tim. So this post is for you log burning cabin dwellers, boy, have we got a lot to catch up on.

I loved that post about Arrested Development guys. No idea what that is. But I loved it

The last time we posted on this blog, we had just started our run of the Edinburgh fringe. We had told ourselves that we could keep a running diary at Edinburgh and post every day with some of our exploits and things we learned from the show and the festival. All in all, we managed about 4 posts before abandoning it completely on the 6th day. But the festival was a lot of fun, we were wholly unprepared for it in every possible sense, and looking back now, we could have gone in a lot stronger; but it's always a learning process and it at least helped us to cement ourselves as a group that makes content together.

Since then, we ummed and ahhhed about how to move forwards, eventually we decided to start producing online sketches as we all lived in very different areas of the country. We produced a number of solo sketches intermittently for a couple of years which can be found in the dark recesses of our oldest videos on our wmd comedy youtube page. Weirdly, if you go straight to the url of youtube.com/wmd it just takes you to a user who doesn't produce any content, but has helpfully collected many many playlists of partial nudity on youtube. Most of which have obviously been deleted.

We've got some really 'stiff' competition! (Please send your high fives by email)

In fact, many of our youtube videos, don't have a lot of views, this is because we have found that we are able to reach a wider audience and collect more views by posting our videos on facebook. It seems that the effort it takes to follow a link off facebook and on to youtube is just too much to bear for many of our casual followers. There's something in my head that tells me a youtube view is somehow more valuable than a facebook view, but I don't know, we haven't worked out the best delivery system yet. There's a lot we've not worked out.

Oh, back to the time-line! So after a few years of some sketches here and there. I (Tom) moved back up north to Manchester, and started regularly meeting up with Ben (lives in York) to start producing some sketches on a regular basis. We set ourselves an initial target of just releasing a sketch every Friday, and seeing how long we could keep it up for/if we enjoyed it and wanted to carry on at all. Well, that was back in November and setting that strict target was one of the best decisions we ever made, because now nearly 6 months later, richer or poorer, better or worse, we still produce something every week. Along the way we figure out what does and doesn't work, make a bunch of mistakes and constantly learn from our own work whilst we develop a more signature style. Plus we constantly add to a rapidly growing portfolio of work which we can look back on with some pride, even just for sheer quantity alone.

"Is this video funny?"............."At least it exists."   ~   A conversation we have often

I remember saying to Ben when we first decided on a weekly output, that the main thing was just to settle into a routine, get used to working together again and consistently release content so that we can slowly develop our skills. We could worry about quality later, once we had all that sorted. But naturally, the quality has started to slowly improve. Our writing, performance and timing is always getting stronger as well as the production quality of what we are filming. Starting as comedians and writers, we now have felt ourselves forced into being genuine film makers; we probably spend 80% of our time trying to figure out proper lighting, sound and focus, rather than the "haha"s.

So if you're still living in the cabin, get a vhs player and have Tim-Tim get onto our facebook and download some videos for you (then somehow put them onto tapes). There'll always be more to keep you entertained, as I say, we produce something every Friday. Don't miss out! WMD Comedy on Facebook