Category: Sketchy Tales - Dan Fiorella: Writer @ large

Dan Fiorella

Sketchy Tales: Buy-agra

7/17/2019

It's a Prairie Home Companion sketch story with a happy ending. I wrote up this piece back in December of 2000 and they passed on it. Too heavy on the double-entendres? Maybe. But I kept it handy afterward.

By December of 2004, I had started freelancing for American Comedy Network, which produced comedy pieces which were then syndicated to radio stations all over the country that subscribed to their service.

Much of the more generic, less topical material that I created for PHC got routed over to ACN (in addition to new stuff). I had a pretty good success rate with them. Coming up on Christmas, Buy-agra was a perfect shopping season sketch that could play off-season as well. Malls were still a thing back then, you have to realize and Black Fridays were the Hunger Games of retail. So, here's the PHC version followed by the ACN production, with a shout out to my old pharmaceutical company, Ulti-med.

Buy-agra

Barely Home Companion: CAFE BOUEF/NRA 5/00

3/15/2019

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...

Once upon a time, the National Rifle Association thought it was going to open a theme restaurant in New York City (Suck on that, Dr. Jekyll's! Later for you, Mission to Mars!) As PHC was in NYC that the time, it seemed like something to go for. And what better way than to run it through one of their regular bits, Cafe Bouef, the snooty French restaurant. I think it came out pretty well. It over lapped pretty well with my own penchant for writing restaurant sketches. However, they did not. And it was kind of a typical bit that would not lend itself to re-submission later on to others, so it's just been loitering on my hard drive until now...

CAFE BOUEF: NRA Edition

Barely Home Companion: PSEUDO-PHOTOS 4/2000

3/11/2019

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...

Before there was Photoshop, before there was airbrushing, there was Pseudo-Photos. This is one of those sketches from college that my partner and I never gave up on. Also, it was always something I would wind up submitting to any comedy troupe that was looking for material. The sketch had gotten on its feet once, for a public-access cable show many years before. So, basically, no one had seen it. I was in that production of the sketch, which is one of the reasons that I don't do sketch comedy. As I was constantly throwing material at the PHC machine, I was unceasingly bouncing between new material and evergreen sketches I had in my filing cabinet. PHC didn't buy the sketch. So, I'm posting it here and as an extra bonus, I'm including the version I did for the show "Big B's Travelling Sideshow;" Which is a topic for another day...

PSEUDO-PHOTOS

Sketchy Tales: American Idol Edition - Soul Patrol

3/3/2019

Well, the new season kicks off tonight, just I post the last of the old season. I tried to avoid doubling up on singers getting attacked in the ads, but poor Taylor Hicks got hit twice, but the two topics were too rich not to go after, especially when you've kinda milked the premise and ran out of terrible things to say about people who looked pretty nice (except Pickler. We all knew). Anyway, this was the final in the AI Negative Ad campaign series...

Sketchy Tales: American Idol Edition - Mandisa

3/2/2019

Wow, this many posts in a week you'd think I'd have something to say! As we approach the start of AI '19, I wanted to show off and bring out my old ACN sketches written back in 2008. ACN had great production values and they were churning out this material constantly. They were always open to new ideas and playing around within the format. I was thrilled that I had come upon a new way to satirize a show without too much overhead; a few bars of the theme, an announcer talks and, boom, you're done. Wish I had some kind of trademark on the thing...

Sketchy Tales: American Idol Edition - Paris

3/1/2019

Sure, in March 2008, negative political ads were around long enough to be a comedy troupe, but then, the negativity was pretty much confined to the ad. People didn't feel the need to take it on the road. YET. Of course, applying that level of vitriol to a singing competition is so off-kilter that it made perfect comedy sense. I was very happy the way these things out. There was a good amount of re-writing on a couple of them, but once the template was set, I didn't feel as bad about the changes.

Sketchy Tales: American Idol Edition - Bucky

2/28/2019

Holy Dunkleman! Sometimes it's hard to come up with a decent sketch idea. People mock SNL or Mad-TV for relying on repeating characters and routines, but sometimes that's all you got. I was lucky American Comedy Network (RIP) let me run with these things. So, from the 2008 season of Idol, we proudly post:

Sketchy Tales: American Idol Edition - Kelly

2/27/2019

When they cancelled American Idol, who'da thought I'd ever get to pull out these old bits again. Sure, sure, they are very much of the cast of the March 2008 season, but I think they are silly enough to avoid aging, now that the show is back on the air. The biggest problem to these bits was deciding which singer was going to go negative on which other singer. I wasn't following the show that closely, so many of my first drafts were vague, but the guys at ACN, who produced and distributed the sketches filled in a lot of blanks...

Sketchy Tales: American Idol Edition - Ace

2/25/2019

Like 10 years ago, there was this big hit TV show that was all the rage. It was called "American Idol." It was a singing competition. I wonder what happened to it. Oh, right, it got rebooted last year and is on ABC now. Well, as the newest season approaches, I wanted to pull out some radio bits I wrote 10 years ago.

One of the great running gags I came up with for American Comedy Network was taking the negative political ads and applying it to other venues. I think it was the Iraqi elections that were held after our invasion that I did first, applying typical GOP dirty trick-style ads for an election that had nothing like that going on. Then it was the election for the Pope in 2005. Then Miss America and so on.

The radio producers at American Comedy Network saw the logic and repeat-ability of the premise and did a couple without my involvement. That hurt. Again, the life of a freelancer, nobody ever comes back to your and says, "Hey how about doing one of these for the Oscar campaigns or "Dancing with the Stars" voting? They would just do it. But, it was some acknowledgement that I had created a viable radio comedy format that just wasn't a straight up parody of the show itself.

Anyway, one of the biggest batches of material I did was these American Idol parodies. I wrote a slew of them. Some of them were re-worked by people who had been following the show more closely than I, but all in all, it was a nice healthy run for myself.

Here we attempt to swiftboat Ace back in 2/2008

Barely Home Companion - NY Auditions 4/2/2000

2/21/2019

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...

This sketch was a real hybrid of old and new. Since the show was in NYC at this time, I decided to do a Broadway-themed bit which would then allow me to pull out my old Auditions sketch. Garrison Keillor like to tell these tales about a past that didn't exist and I decided he would talk about being a Broadway baby. A couple of NY stereotypes, a few funny voices, and >boom<, you got a segue into my original sketch and it sounded custom made.

They didn't use it. But it's not like it was never done...

AUDITIONS

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