Edinburgh 2022: BriTANicK Guest Blog

Guest Blog: Emmy Award nominees BriTANick make their Edinburgh debut with highly anticipated sketch comedy show

Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher discuss their love and fondness for performing on stage

Brian and Nick, collectively known as BriTANick blog for BroadwayWorld about making their Edinburgh debut, the difference between writing for stage and for screen and what is uniquely enjoyable about performing for a live audience.

Hi, we're BriTANicK! Or to be more specific, we're Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher. We've been making online sketch comedy videos since 2008, and while that sentence is embarrassing to write, it's even more embarrassing to live. Despite the fact that most people know us from these videos, many don't know how often we perform live onstage or that we consider it be as much a part of our identity as our videos. Our stage show is a very physical, emotionally charged, tightly choreographed collection of sketches that widely range in genre. It's as exhausting as it is thrilling to perform.

A lot of people ask us if we ever take our stage sketches and just film them when we make videos, and the answer is almost never. Not just because we're lazy (we are), but because we have found that writing for stage vs. screen is so inherently different.

For one, our stage sketches and video sketches are often very different sizes. The stage is normally very limiting, so most of our ideas take place in one location in real time. Our stage sketches normally explore a growing idea in a single space, often unravelling slowly. For film, there's no limit to size, so anything that requires multiple locations or fantastical journeys often goes to the screen.

Pacing is often a huge consideration. Onstage, you need to find a sketch that can be funny as it moves at the speed of life because you basically have only your bodies and your words to move the show along. Nearly all our stage sketches heavily rely on the dynamic between the two of us, and we're always looking for a great idea that specifically explores the tension in a relationship. On film, that relationship is important, but a lot of our sketches have jokes and premises that rely on editing, visual cues, genre parody, and a heightening that can only be accomplished onscreen.

Theatre is also more a spectacle than the screen, so anything involving high physicality or witty wordplay seems to really pop onstage more than on a video. We want to find big, playable premises that makes people say "Wow, they're really doing this live?!" whether that's a fast-paced piece of physical comedy or a complexly worded monologue. We have found that audiences often feel more comfortable sitting in longer pieces in the theatre, where you can really languish in something that feels exciting or impressive, whereas you don't get as much time on screen, and you need to keep it moving. We also try to build to emotionally charged moments for the stage, something to really make our audience feel like they're seeing Theatre with a capital T.

If it sounds like we're biased towards the stage, it's because we are. Performing live is about 3000x more fun than performing on a film set because we get to fully respond to YOU and how you're perceiving us in the moment. Being able to shape the scene in real time as the audience is laughing feels like we're all part of the performance, whereas showing something on a screen feels like a clear delineation between the artist and the observer. Live theatre is just a more communal experience, and lives as fast as it dies. The waters of comedy flow into a space, let us all ride their waves, and then wash out the door after an hour, never to be seen again. The rush and thrill of that is like nothing else. Filming something and putting it online to millions of views definitely feels good but making 50 people laugh in a small theatre feels like the entire world.

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Photo credit: Sela Shiloni

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