How to Learn Lines for Sketch Comedy (When the Script Keeps Changing)

You’re in eight sketches. Three of them are set in an office, two are the same character in different situations, and one is a single page where you have four lines and the last one is the button. The writers have already rewritten the opener twice, and the director has hinted that something might get cut after the preview.

Learning lines for a sketch show is not like learning a play. A play is one long story that helps you remember what comes next. A sketch show is a stack of short, unrelated scripts, often written by different people, that keep changing until the night you open. The words are fewer, but each one matters more, because a sketch lives or dies on a few precise laughs.

The short version: learn each sketch through its game and its button first, learn the cues as carefully as your lines, practice by testing yourself instead of rereading, give similar sketches clear labels so they don’t blur together, and treat rewrites as normal, not as a disaster.

Why sketch is its own kind of memorizing

The best-known sketch show on television shows the problem at full scale. NBC’s own account of how Saturday Night Live is made describes a week in which writers hand in sketches by Wednesday, the host and cast read through every one of them at a long table read. Other accounts of the week, such as LateNighter’s, put it at roughly 40 to 50 sketches read and around 10 chosen. On Saturday there is a dress rehearsal in front of a live audience, and more sketches are cut based on how that crowd reacts.

Cast member Sarah Sherman has described cuts happening at every stage: before the table read, after it, after dress, and even during the live show. Scripts also change right up to air, which is why the show relies on hand-lettered cue cards. Parade’s profile of Wally Feresten, who leads the cue-card team, explains that the cards exist because scripts change up to the last minute.

Your revue, your college sketch group, or your Fringe show probably doesn’t have a cue-card department. You’re the one who has to carry the late changes. So you need a way of learning that expects the script to move.

Learn the game and the button before the words

Improv and sketch teachers talk about the game of the scene: the one specific, unusual idea that makes the scene funny. UCB’s teaching, summed up from its Comedy Improvisation Manual, is that the game usually starts from the first unusual thing in a scene. Before you memorize a single line, say the game out loud in one sentence. “A waiter keeps apologizing for things that are clearly the customer’s fault.” “Two burglars are more worried about the carpet than the police.”

The game is your map. Sketches are often built as beats that heighten the same idea, so knowing the game can help you work out what comes next, even before you remember the exact words. That’s the comic version of what psychologists Helga and Tony Noice found in their research on actors: professionals rarely learn by rote. They work out what each line does for the character, and the words come along with the intention, as the APS Observer’s summary of their research on how actors learn roles explains.

Then learn the button, the last line that ends the sketch. Backstage’s list of comedy terms every actor should know covers it along with the rest of the vocabulary you’ll hear in a sketch room. Know the button word for word from day one, because it’s the line that ends the sketch, and often the one the lights, music, or blackout are timed to.

Learn it word-perfect, because the joke is in the words

In a drama, a paraphrase can survive. In comedy, it usually can’t. A joke often turns on one word, and that word usually works best near the end of the line, where the audience hears it. If you move it, the laugh goes with it.

Look at this exchange from the opening of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which works like a sketch beat with a deadpan topper:

ALGERNON: Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralising as that?

LANE: I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.

ALGERNON: [Languidly.] I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane.

LANE: No, sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself.

Act I, in the public-domain Project Gutenberg text.

Try paraphrasing Lane’s last line as “I don’t really think about it, sir.” The meaning survives, but the laugh is gone, because the joke needs “I never think of it myself” to land after the polite, formal “not a very interesting subject.” The same goes for “only been married once.” If you say “I’ve been married once, only,” it falls flat. When you learn comic lines, check the exact words and their order, not just the sense.

Test yourself instead of rereading

With short scripts, it’s tempting to read them over and over, because each one takes two minutes. That feels productive, but over a week it loses to testing yourself. In Roediger and Karpicke’s 2006 study, students who reread a passage did better on a test five minutes later, but a week later the students who had practiced recalling it remembered far more (61% against 40%), even though the rereaders had predicted they would do better. The study is in Psychological Science.

So for each sketch, use the same short drill:

1. Read the sketch once through, aloud, and name the game in one sentence.
2. Cover your lines and read the cue before each one, then say your line from memory.
3. Uncover and check it word for word, especially the last few words of each joke.
4. Mark the lines you missed and drill only those, then run the whole sketch again.
5. Finish with the button, said exactly, three times in a row.

You can turn any sketch into first-letter prompts with our free line memorizer, which is a good halfway step between the full text and no text at all. For more on drills, see how to memorize lines quickly.

Keep similar sketches apart

Eight short scripts create a problem a single play doesn’t: they interfere with each other. Memory researchers call this interference. Older learning can disrupt newer learning, newer learning can disrupt older learning, and the effect is strongest when the material is similar, as Simply Psychology’s overview of proactive and retroactive interference explains. Two office sketches with a boss character are the perfect setup for saying the wrong boss’s line.

A few habits keep them separate:

• Give each sketch a short, vivid name that matches its game, not the writer’s working title. “Sorry Waiter” is easier to hold than “Restaurant 2”.
• Learn similar sketches on different days if you can, so one is solid before you start the next.
• Give each character its own physical life, and attach movement to specific lines. The Noices found that lines learned with a fitting movement were remembered better.
• Write the first line of every sketch on one card in running order. Before rehearsal, read only the first lines and check that you can name each sketch’s game and button.
• Space the practice. A big review of spacing research by Cepeda and colleagues found that spread-out study beats massed study, so a few short sessions across the week will do more than one long cram the night before.

Learn your cues as carefully as your lines

Sketch moves fast. Even a short gap between lines can drain the energy from a joke, so you need to come in right on the end of the other person’s line. That means knowing the last few words of each cue as well as your own text. Our guide on how to pick up cues covers the technique.

Fast cues don’t mean rushing the laugh, though. Going on too soon and cutting a laugh short is called stepping on a laugh, as the AACT glossary of theater terms puts it. The skill is to hold, then come in as the laugh starts to fall. You can’t rehearse that alone, but you can rehearse the cues that set it up.

It also helps to know that comic timing isn’t simply a dramatic pause before the punchline. Attardo and Pickering recorded people telling jokes and found no reliable pause before the punchline. So instead of building a pause, focus on a clean setup and a clear punch word, said on time. For more, read our guide on comedic timing for actors.

Run it with another voice, at the right speed

Once you know the words, run each sketch with someone reading the other parts, so you’re answering a voice instead of a page. A castmate is ideal. When no one’s free, Offbook can read the other characters: upload the sketch, pick your role, and realistic voices read every other part while Offbook listens through your microphone and plays the next cue when you finish your line. You can set how fast the other voices talk, add a beat before a line where a laugh will go, and turn on auto-advance so the scene keeps moving if you dry up.

That last part matters for comedy. A sketch that stops dead every time you drop a line trains you to stop. A run that keeps going trains you to recover, which is what you need in front of an audience. For a final test of each sketch, hide your own lines in Offbook. Then, close to performance, run the whole running order from memory.

Listen to your sketches on your phone on the commute, too. Hearing the rhythm of a scene over and over is a good way to learn where the laughs sit.

When the rewrite comes

A late rewrite is part of the job in sketch. A well-known example is Stefon on SNL. Bill Hader has described on NPR’s Fresh Air how a joke was changed after dress rehearsal without anyone telling him, so he saw the new line for the first time live, on the card, and broke. After that, his co-writer, John Mulaney, kept changing Stefon’s jokes after dress.

You probably don’t want to get the new line for the first time on stage. So when a change comes:

• Read the new version aloud right away, and mark exactly what changed: one word, a line, or the whole ending.
• Drill only the changed lines and the cue into and out of them, using the cover-and-check drill.
• If the button changed, learn the new one word for word before anything else.
• Tell your scene partners what changed in your lines, because a new line is often a new cue for them.
• Throw away the old page. Two versions on paper means two versions in your head.

Our guide to handling script changes in a new play has more on keeping the old version from creeping back.

A week-out plan for a sketch show

• Seven days out: read every sketch aloud, name each game in one sentence, and learn every button.
• Six to four days out: learn two or three sketches a day with the cover-and-check drill, keeping similar sketches on different days.
• Three days out: run every sketch with a reader or recorded voices, focusing on cues.
• Two days out: run the whole show in order, from first lines only, then fully off book.
• The day before: one calm run of each sketch, and the buttons once more. Then sleep.

Adjust the days to your schedule, but keep the order: game and button, then lines with their cues, then cue speed with a reader, then running order.

Questions actors ask

Do sketch actors really memorize everything?

On stage, yes: a live revue or sketch show expects you to be off book. SNL uses cue cards because the scripts change so late, but even there some hosts learn the cards anyway. Adam Driver has said he memorizes his cue cards because he dislikes it when you can tell someone is reading.

How long does it take to learn a sketch?

It depends on the length, how many lines are yours, and how fast you learn. Whatever the first session takes, a sketch won’t stay without a few spaced reviews over the following days. The hard part isn’t one sketch. It’s keeping eight of them separate.

Can I improvise if I forget a line?

If you know the game, you can usually keep the scene alive with a line that plays the same idea, and good scene partners will help you back. Then get to the button. Try not to improvise around a setup line, though, because a joke later in the sketch may depend on it.

How do I learn lines for a sketch I’m not sure will make the show?

Learn the game and the button first for every sketch, then the full lines starting with the ones most likely to stay. If a sketch is cut, you’ve spent the least time on it. If it survives, you have the frame to learn the rest quickly.