Sketch comedy is everywhere… except where it should be
Sketch comedy is having a moment—just not on TV.
Here’s a fact that should blow your mind: The only two nominees for this year’s “Outstanding Scripted Variety Series” Emmy are Saturday Night Live and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. That’s it. Two shows. Why even keep the category if no one else gets a shot? This category is supposed to celebrate the ENTIRE wild world of scripted variety and sketch (one of the wackiest worlds in the world…you get it!), reduced to the same two white guys in a high-stakes thumb war over a statue. At this point, why not just give them joint custody and call it a day?
It didn’t used to be like this. There was a time when SNL wasn’t the only long-running sketch juggernaut in town. Mad TV held it down for 14 seasons before going gently into that good night in 2009. HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show was both critically acclaimed and culturally essential: gone.
Sure, we’ve had nibbles of sketch comedy:
- Anthologies: Netflix’s The Characters was an incubator for some of the most inventive comedians working today.
- Hour-long specials: Some of the most cutting-edge sketch comedy I’ve seen recently was in Kate Berlant and John Early’s Would It Kill You To Laugh?
- One-season wonders: The impeccably strange and singular Fantasmas stands out among even long-running TV of the last decade.
And, of course, there have been bright spots. Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave (where’s THAT Emmy nom) on Netflix has become a cult phenomenon, churning out viral sketches and endlessly quotable oddball bits. Across the pond, British sketch series like Peep Show, Little Britain, and the more recent Famalam have shown the genre’s staying power and versatility. But even those hits tend to live in niche or cult territory rather than the broad, long-running cultural dominance that SNL still enjoys in the U.S.
The maddening part? Sketch comedy itself is thriving. It’s not on your TV, cutie, it’s on your phone. TikTok is an endless sketch showcase. Instagram Reels? Same. YouTube? Forget abouddit! Sketches dominate, rack up millions of views, and launch careers all over the industry faster than you can say “algorithm.” (Where do you think Benito Skinner came from?) Gen Z treats sketches the way millennials treated burning CDs: highly shareable, highly personal, and ripe for obsession.
So if the audience is there (and it is!! How do you think Dropout makes all that money?), what’s the holdup? Networks seem stuck in a risk-averse loop. Why invest in a new ensemble when you can just keep cranking out the familiar formula? But that logic ignores the fact that sketch is where culture moves fastest. Characters, parodies, and catchphrases break out overnight. Entire genres of memes start as sketch jokes. Sketch isn’t just part of the cultural conversation—it’s the spark that starts it.
And here’s the thing: The talent pipeline exists. There are comedians right now training year-round, collaborating, and workshopping sketches like they’re already on a weekly show. GOLD Comedy’s Sketchpad is one example—an academic-year deep dive into writing, performing, producing, and editing sketch comedy, with hundreds of hours of live and on-demand training, all in a funny community ready to collab.
So yes, the next sketch phenomenon is coming. And we’re all waiting patiently (OKAY, I’m not waiting THAT patiently) for it! The question is whether TV will catch it… or if it’ll just go viral online while the same two guys play another round of Emmy tug-of-war.
