Live Sketch Comedy (And a Course in Stroud)
- Chris Head
- Jul 30
- 2 min read
My live sketch comedy course in Stroud, starting September 2026. Info & Booking.
In a live comedy sketch show, whole scenes and situations can be conjured up out of thin air with perhaps just a few chairs, minimal costume and mimed props. And like a stand-up performance, you can break the fourth wall and talk to the audience.
To get a flavour of the style, check out the video above of the brilliant lo-fi sketch double-act Two Episodes of Mash, with Joe Wilkinson and Diane Morgan (before they became massive). In this style of sketch comedy, is built around the clear comic personas of you and your fellow comics and the relationships between you.
And, as can be the case in improv, the characters are often only a thin veil over your own comedic personas. Indeed, the pleasure for the audience will be in seeing you playing the characters.
Also, as when you do a stand-up act-out, you never fully step into a fictional world. Even while a sketch is in progress you will bicker as ‘yourselves’ and talk about things that are happening in the room. You might stop a sketch and restart it, or abandon it altogether.
None of this need rule out using classic comedy sketch structures and approaches, but the great joy of this kind of live work is you can play fast and loose with it all.
In my Live Sketch Comedy Course in Stroud, you’ll create, write and perform brilliant comedy sketches, performing them in a show at the end of the course that will have the live immediacy of stand-up.
In the live performance at the end of the course (in the form of a rehearsed reading of the sketches), much like Wilkinson and Morgan’s Two Episodes of Mash, it's about the chemistry between you and your fellow performers, as much as it’s about the sketches.
You'll ‘break the fourth wall’, break the rules, bicker between yourselves about how to end a sketch, engage directly with the audience, and even abandon sketches midway!
The course is perfect if you want to have fun, collaborate with a great group, and sharpen your comedy writing and performance skills (and live in or near Stroud, obviously. Less perfect if you, say, live in Glasgow).
Here's a couple of photos of the sketch show at the end of a course I ran a few years ago in London. (The chaps in the second one are in a sketch where they're playing pigeons).
Upcoming Stroud Live Sketch Show Course
7pm-9pm, Wednesday nights, 9th Sept 2026 - 7th Oct 2026
£97.50
