Category: Sketch - Dan Fiorella: Writer @ large

Dan Fiorella

Barely Home Companion - On the Page (Jun. '07)

6/12/2026

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...

Well, here's a silly bit I had totally forgotten about mocking the reality show craze. It's a pretty good late-career submission to PHC. I think what triggered the sketch was a show that was going to be about picking a director to make a film...wash it Project Greenlight? or some such thing. Anyway, they went on and on about directors and I decided to go with a real WGA-twist to create the most boring really show ever; watching writers write. On radio! The SFX of typewriters makes me chuckle as I reread it. Maybe I can do this as an AI bit, just lose the celebrity judges...

On the Page

Barely Home Companion - Off-shore Trans-Fat Restaurants (Jun. '07)

6/5/2026

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...

Back in 2007, (as I explain in the bit) the mayor of NYC was on a real health kick, attacking Big Gulps and transfats, and making laws against them. Now, how does one get around laws? By going into international waters, of course. I really liked this sketch and tried to work it into something. I did rework it to present to PHC, but they didn't go for it. Even with a pretty decent Mark Twain joke. And now that transfats are practically on the food pyramid, it doesn't seem like something to get back to...maybe food dyes? I dunno. Anyway, here's the bit as GK read it...

Off-shore Trans-Fat Restaurants

A.I.-Caramba! presents: Chef Shift

5/13/2026

Because of lack of resources, I’ve taken to “producing” my sketch ideas with AI. This is not a recommended solution. See that logo? AI generated. And yet I had to run it through photoshop to really get it right. There were a couple of things I already had to tweak, besides. Anyway, on to more creative things:

Chef Shift popped into my head while I was working on something else...the words Chef Shift popped into my head and I just built it up from there. It's a cute idea, but once I had the basic concept of the show, I decided to do it promo-style, so I just started to create photos of chefs and kitchens and judges. But trying to get the images to move, even briefly, got too aggravating. All my dialogue was created as off-screen lines, the video I created had to be edited in the software. I ask for a rock and rock chef waving romaine lettuce and it just had the lettuce hanging in midair waiting for the chef to grab it. Ask for a kitchen full of chefs to run around panicked, and AI just has them merge into one another. I thought something simple like having a group of chefs just cross their arms would be okay. Instead, they all do the Wakanda salute. Just to get a judge to wave a chef off, his hand was upside down. So, it's stills and short shots, and narration to carry it through. I hope you enjoy!

A.I.-Caramba! presents: Pirate Patch

4/25/2026

Because of lack of resources, I’ve taken to “producing” my sketch ideas with AI. This is not a recommended solution. See that logo? AI generated. And yet I had to run it through photoshop to really get it right. There were a couple of things I already had to tweak, besides. Anyway, on to more creative things:

Dan Fiorella · Pirate Patch ad

Pirate Patch was something I wrote back in 2004, originally for Prairie Home Companion. A quick little commercial pun, from back in the day when Big Pharma was pushing patches for everything as a drug delivery system to work to fight smoking, pain, addiction, hunger. It was rejected (my sketch, not the patches). I sent it around but nothing worked.

Doing the blog has reminded me of a lot of material I had forgotten about, but this sketch always stayed in the back of my mind, especially come "Talk Like a Pirate Day." So, I once I got to playing around with AI, I decided to use it. But here's the thing about AI; it's a bear to work with. After doing a couple of other things with it, I just gets annoying to use. And the idea of attempting to do an office set up with two co-workers conversing seemed like a daunting task and then trying to do a character who has to go through a before & after change? AI would totally change the guy's look. I'm sure an expert could pull it off, but I'm just a writer, so I decided to do it as audio. And even then, it's tricky to get audio that doesn't sound like a bored actor reading his lines.

I finally got them to a point I was satisfied with, then realized I hadn't done the character's 'after' dialogue, so I just recorded myself as the post-pharm co-worker, because my goofy voice works in the role. And frankly, it just seemed easier that way. It's up at Sound Cloud and here it is for your enjoyment. Expect me to repost this every "Talk Like a Pirate Day."

The B Team-Big B's Traveling Sideshow-Psuedo-Photos

1/23/2026

Back in the early 1980s, we hooked up with a troupe who were doing a 1/2 hour comedy show called "Big B's Traveling Sideshow" (Or "Travelling." We never quite settled on that). They had a sponsor. They had four people who could do characters, impressions and seemed to be able to perform comedy. They had a music guy who wrote them a theme. They had head shots. And they were ready to take on the world of Manhattan Cable TV, where porn ruled.

We are set up in a new studio after having the show on "hiatus" for what felt like months. It was third show for Big B's. More on that with the next chapter on the cold open. John Rawlins and I had written this sketch a while previously and we both always loved it. Inspired by those stock photos they put in the picture frames you buy, it was an idea for a ridiculous product to solve a ludicrous problem in a totally ineffective way. I always loved the line about developing her first roll of color film. And for reasons that elude me, I'm in the sketch with the wacky Jordan Auslander. Big B herself, Bea Bevis, was paired with Carole Real.

I'll be honest, I'm a ham at heart, so I was very excited to be in this sketch. I worked hard on it. I had a new perm flown in. I thought we pulled it off, DESPITE the fact that you can actually HEAR the control room on the audio (This was the "new" studio that they had found and it was barely an improvement over having no studio). I remember getting a copy of the show and bringing it home to show the family. Now, you have to know, the family wasn't too big on compliments. They showed their love via insults and put-downs. After I showed them this sketch, they began calling me Otto. And not in a fun way. After that, I didn't share much of my writing life with them for a long while.

I once again note: the picture ratio is off, like your smart TV that gets confused between new TV shows and old TV shows.

Psuedo-Photos

The B Team: Big B's Traveling Sideshow-The Plant Store

1/16/2026

Back in the early 1980s, we hooked up with a troupe who were doing a 1/2 hour comedy show called "Big B's Traveling Sideshow" (Or "Travelling." We never quite settled on that). They had a sponsor. They had four people who could do characters, impressions and seemed to be able to perform comedy. They had a music guy who wrote them a theme. They had head shots. What they needed were writers!

We watched their first show (it was okay. And they had spunk). They were trying to maintain a regular schedule but booking studio time was costly. And they needed more material. Several us submitted some sketches from our trunks, and they liked them. One of the sketches they decided to do was my Plant Store sketch.

Written during my "Monty Python" phase, it was one of those typical two-handers that involved a store owner and a customer. It starts off weird and spirals out from there. This was very much in the fashion of sketches I had written during college, like The Pet Store, or a "Rock Class," which was a geology class with a professor instead of a shopkeep. Puns and ridiculous logic abound. What fun. I wrote more and eventually dubbed the store owner Martin Storeman, but there wasn't a lot of demand for the guy.

I know Jim Farley liked the character and really ratcheted up the insanity of the guy to the point where he had the plant lunge at him at the end. Weirdly, one of my strongest memories of Farley was in this time, they were renaming the main post office in Manhattan, right next to Penn Station after his grandfather, James Farley, and Jim Farley was going to the ceremony (as he should) but somehow was going to turn it into a "networking" thing to advance his career. Pretty sure that didn't pan out. And now they turned the James Farley Post Office into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Train Hall (the new Penn Station) because it was the twin of the old Penn Station, which they torn down to put up Madison Square Garden. That's the creative life in NYC.

And again, sorry about the picture ratio.

The Plant Store

Sketchy Tales: The B Team-Big B's Traveling Sideshow-Red Tape Tech

1/9/2026

Time to do some flashing back. In the years after college, I fell into a group of people trying to put together a fan-zine. This was a thing back in the early 1980s; "self-publishing" a magazine which you would then self-distribute to various stores, usually record stores and hemp shops, hoping that someone would actually pick one up and pay to read it (it now occurs to me that this is actually a story for another day). Anyway, one of the members of that group mentioned to us that he was working with a "comedy troupe" that was doing a sketch show on Manhattan's infamous public access channel. Me? I didn't have cable. In fact, I don't think any of us did. So, we met with the head of the troupe who were doing a 1/2 hour comedy show called "Big B's Traveling Sideshow" (Or "Travelling." We never quite settled on that). They had a sponsor. They had four people who could do characters, impressions and seemed to be able to perform comedy. They had a music guy who wrote them a theme. They had head shots.

We met with the group; led by Jim Farley (no, not of the SNL Farleys, but of the former Postmaster General Farleys), his girlfriend, Bea Beavis (the one with an actual credit), Danny Migliarese, Larry Shaw, & Terry Sommer. They had done an episode for the infamous Manhattan cable public access channel. They liked our stuff. Take, for example, the below bit, Red Tape Tech. I wrote this with my friend, John Rawlins. It was just your average commercial parody, but we met an interesting dude here, Jordan Auslander, a very funny and frantic person. I wish I remembered more of the details, but Jordan got to do the sketch, a big, old, wordy sketch. It had the typical word play and back-tracking logic any piece written by Rawlins would have. So, it got taped and was put into show 2. And me? They misspelled my name in the end credits, which is actually kind of a show business tradition. Also, I apologize for the picture ratio, I digitized this myself years ago on some software and didn't realized I switched it from standard TV square to landscape. Not sure I have the original tapes to re-do them.

They used the guy Larry Shaw in the opening, along with a new "featured player" who was coming on as a writer. I'm still friends with Jordan, who does investigative ancestry searches now and would throw these wacky James Bond-themed parties. Later on, we did some theater groups together, he even did a VO for one of my book promos, Space Case. A good guy.

Red Tape Tech

A.I.-Caramba! Bagpipes

12/31/2025

Because of lack of resources, I’ve taken to “producing” my sketch ideas with AI. This is not a recommended solution.

This sketch has a history, and I wrote about it here. I wrote bagpipes a long time ago. It seems like a silly, easy to produce sketch, bordering on the absurd. It made the rounds in all medium; TV packets, submitted PHC radio sketch, comedy troupe fodder, but it never made the grade. I decided to create it as an audio file because, frankly, the last sketch I did, Misfit Island, really drained me. It was a lot of work and re-work and by the end, I was rooting around for short cuts. I bit off more than I could chew there. Anyway, it works fine as an audio bit, a throwback to old time radio. It's just nice to see it exist in a form that doesn't have to be read on a blog. It can be listened to on a blog!

Dan Fiorella · The History of Music-Bagpipes

A.I.-Caramba! Escape From the Island of Misfit Toys

12/17/2025

Because of lack of resources, I’ve taken to “producing” my sketch ideas with AI. This is not a recommended solution. I wrote and re-wrote this sketch multiple times over the years. There was a draft I wrote for the heck of it. That was basically the Jack/Charlie question and segued into the standard “What’s Dolly’s deal?” that the internet has since decided to suck dry. Then I attempted to rework it for Prairie Home Companion during my time there as an audio bit. Then I pulled it out again for my time at TMI: Hollywood, where I actually combined it with a second sketch I had written about the new kind of toys that would be exiled to the island, an idea I had some time later for one of the radio outlets I often submitted to.

I’ve played with AI before, but not to this extend. But this sketch seemed to be a logical one to attempt; all the players are toys, which I can easily reference. Then after thinking about it, I decided to work as much as I could with actual clips from the show. The past projects I created all have the same defect, I can only produce the material in 5-second clips (that’s the default setting for the various AI sites I’ve logged onto) Then trying to make them talk becomes a hassle. First, because they’re “toys” some of the faces aren’t apparent to the AI system and the attempt at generating a video would fail. Sometimes it was just easier to create an AI voice and run it under some original footage. Towards the end, I was tired of caring if the mouth movements matched up. Half the time with AI, it couldn’t match up. Then I maxed out AI’s ability to manipulate characters. You tell AI to have a character exit the scene and it would have a human hand come down and pick it up.

I was able to get the voices I needed from AI. Some sound very good. Others sound like bad actors handling the part. I was able to create variations of the Misfits I needed. Then I had to create some of the “new toys.” That took a couple of attempts. And that's the problem, every attempt costs.

Then came the fun with the editing software. At five minutes, the software was grindingly slow, updates and corrections took forever to make and even the slightest change would send me into buffering hell. I reached the pointed where halfway in, I exported the working video of dozens of clips, audio, stills and music into a single video. Then loaded that into the software to edit and polish and add to it. I had to do it 2 more times for the ending and then music and text. One issue was figuring out the chromakey. I had to create the images. Then I realized I had to create them on a green background. Then I had to deal with the different shades of green that the AI would create.

At least I created some of the clips at the end first, so as I was hitting wall after wall, I had some of the bits already in queue. There was a lot of editing, copying and pasting and altering speeds and playback to get the clips I needed to the audio I had. At some point I’ll have to make a post about my AI outtakes, creations so horribly wrong there was nothing to salvage from them.

I could have tightened it up a bit. When it was written as a stage piece, I had to have the characters introduce themselves to set up the bit and place. But here, using the actual characters and footage, I could have easily begun the sketch with Charlie and Dolly bemoaning another Christmas Eve. Oh, also, the Zimbabwe thing, that was based on actual events about 10 years ago where a dentist caught a lot of online flak for his trophy hunting selfies. So, maybe I could have dropped that, too. It is pretty grim. But, hey, if I don't do it now, the way I wrote it, when will I ever?

As a showcase for my writing, that’s up in the air at the moment. But the fact that I can’t get AI at the level I can afford (which is minimal or “free trial”) to maintain how a dolly looks between clips is something I’m sure the bigwigs at the Hollywood studios are battling with.

But as a hobby? Hobbies are supposed to be fun, no?

Barely Home Companion - Abbott & Costello Meet Scrooge (Dec. '06)

12/5/2025

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...

Obviously, December rolled around and I must have felt compelled to do my first Christmas sketch. As I often did with PHC, I circled back to Abbott and Costello. I mean, is it a good idea? Maybe. But that I went right with a "Who's on First" parody about the names of the three ghosts to mimic the names of the three ball players seems weak. But it goes fast and I'm sure it would gets some laughs. I worked it into one of GK's patented "Tonight on most public radio stations" set-ups, and I assumed it stood a chance, but it got passed over, much like the other holiday.

Abbott & Costello Meet Scrooge

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