NICK
CADDAYE.
ON WRITING
AND DIRECTING
SKETCH COMEDY
He’s obviously passionate about producing quality
shows for festivals or even for off season, once off
events, but it became apparent to Caddaye in the interview that sketch comedy is not just an organisational
issue, it’s a whole new level of organisation.
“The biggest thing I’ve done in recent years was the
Anarchist Guild Social Committee”.
Nick Caddaye gets settled in his chair as he is peppered with questions about his long history in sketch
comedy. Considered somewhat of an aficionado in the
Melbourne sketch comedy scene. Caddaye has been
around consistently since 1998. Having performed 12
Comedy Festival shows and 8 Fringe festival shows,
most of which have been sketch.
His most recent role is as a director where he is providing a “coaching role” for Rama Nicholas in her unique
theatre/character-based performance, “Death Rides
A Horse” as well as Lisa Skye’s, “Songs My Parents
Taught me”. Which he states, …’Could not be more
different, which is good for me. I like to collaborate with
a variety of different people’.
YAWP was interested in finding out what Caddaye’s
approach to comedy is. In particular, how he has managed to do the things he has done when mounting
sketch comedy.
‘Well, it’s a lot of hard work. There’s always got to be
someone who is prepared to put in the hard yards, because the rewards are worth it’.
‘An open mic comedy night is not a content issue.
There’s no struggle to get content. There are a load of
rooms and even more people trying to get gigs. So in
that regard, an open mic night is just an organisational
issue. You have to organise the performers, organise
the audience to be there on the night and that is essentially it.
With sketch comedy, it’s a bit different because you
have to generate props, you have to rehearse, block
out and perform the idea to an audience once and never again. Once we perform the sketch, in the context
of the Anarchist Guild, we moved on to next month’s
show. So it’s hard to sustain a room which is solely for
the purpose of sketch comedy, unlike open mic rooms.
I mean, even then, there are open mic rooms which
come and go because the people who run it are passionate, but maybe along the way will realise that it
takes more than passion to get a continual crowd of
people coming through the door’.
So with all things, there is literally one thing that keeps
a show like the Anarchists Guild Social Committee going…
‘Money’. He outwardly replies.
‘We didn’t make so much money out of the show. It
costs quite a lot to put on. You might not think it, but
we hired a lot of costumes and things like that. And if
someone wrote in, ‘There’s a bear in this sketch’, then
we’d go out and buy a bear costume, which I’m sure
you can guess is quite expensive. And if you get 100
people in and yes, you charge $15 a head.