The Motley Crew is a comedy performance that focuses on five very different people in the same university accommodation. This performance was developed throughout our ‘Funny words’ module that saw us focus on what lines and language make something funny for an audience. We decided to create stereotypical characters to help us identify and highlight the stereotypes that are often imposed onto us by society. In many comedy shows there are characters displaying specific characteristics that are always used, these are comedy character tropes. In our piece we have Kev (Lads lad) Hannah (Boring) Sydney (Mean girl) Bev (Angry girlfriend) Phillippe (Boring). We assigned our characters very early on as we knew familiarity would be key to creating a good performance. We agreed together that the characters and their personality traits must be believable.

At the beginning of our creative process as group we realised that relatable comedy and being funny for the sake of being funny was something that we were all interested in. In conversation and discussion we found ‘How I met your mother’, ‘Friends’ and ‘Friday Night Dinner’ were all sitcoms we thoroughly enjoyed because of how we could relate to some of the hilarious scenarios, or if we couldn’t relate we laughed at how ridiculous a situation could be. I don’t believe a thing always has to be witty or clever to be funny, sometimes the normal and the mundane can be funny and this was the kind of comedy we wanted to produce.

Improvising scenes was the main way that my group formed our piece. We would enter the space with an idea of where we want the scene to go and what we want to achieve from it and go from there. Although this may not be the most conventional way of working it worked for us as we were able to bounce off each other and would find new, unexpected material that we would not get from simply sitting and writing scenes. The process we developed when creating the script involved discussing what scenes in TV shows or plays we had found funny, things that had happened to us in the past, or stories we had been told that we found comedic which we would then put into the context of the characters in the play to see if they worked. Sharing the work, we created in sessions with our peers really helped our group figure out if our dynamic was working. When people would laugh and tell us ‘that reminded me of so and so’ we knew that we had succeeded in creating a relatable comedy piece.

Additionally, The Motley Crew was the first time that I had worked independently to create our own performance without being led by a tutor. This module taught me a lot about the value of collaboration within the arts and the how important each other’s creative voice is. Although I am very proud of what we produced I do believe that this style of comedy would work better as a sitcom/sketch show. The reason for this being it would allow our characters to change costumes, set etc. which I believe would add greatly to the humor.