ONLINE - Sketch Comedy 102: Deepening Your Comedy
8 weeks | Wednesdays | Begins January 14, 2026
5pm-7pm PT | 6pm-8pm MT | 7pm-9pm CT | 8pm-10pm ET | 9pm-11pm AT
Instructor: Ashleigh Stanczak
MEMBER PRICE: $400.00
NON-MEMBER PRICE: $550.00
Mid level comedy course. Take what you’ve learned about sketch comedy from 101 and deepen your comedy writing! The deepest and most profound laughs come from people sharing their tragedy. Think Tig Notaro's off the cuff storytelling about the time her mom died while she found out she had cancer. What can you use from your own life? How can you turn your life stories into comedy? How can we reframe our darkest time and actually use it to make us laugh? Each week we’ll focus on comedians and shows who have taken their life stories - their grief, their broken heart, their tragic misunderstandings - and turned it into comedy. Fleabag, Hanna Gadsby, Work in Progress, Insecure, Baby Reindeer, I Love That For You, The Bear, Tig Notaro, and more. We’ll read pieces from great comedy writers such as Samantha Irby and Dave Eggers. What’s your comedy tone? Your voice? Each week we’ll do in class writing prompts to uncover the stories you want to tell. You’ll be assigned weekly sketch comedy and comedic storytelling writing assignments that we’ll review in class!
This workshop takes place online via Zoom.
Ashleigh Stanczak is an award winning comedy director and writer of over 15 years. As the proud recipient of the HBO Women in Comedy Audience Award for Parent Teacher Conference and the NBCUniversal Shorts Fest semi-finalist for Girl Brain, she has written for Refinery29, a Blaze Imprint, and Upright Citizens Brigade. Her writing has also finalized in the Austin Film Festival with her pilot “Kill Me?” and feature script, “The Life of Fat Girls.” She directed several episodes of the Funny or Die series Coach Von Pidgeon as well as the directing, co-writing, and selling the short New Hair to Funny or Die. She studied Filmmaking at NYFA and screenwriting at Emerson College, where she completed an intensive independent workshop with graduate program director Jean Stawarz. After studying sketch comedy at UCB, she quickly became the head writer and director for iO West Comedy Network. In 2020 she created the popular instagram account Female Apartments from 90’s Movies, where she writes comedic blurbs about 90’s and early 2000’s rom com’s. A podcast soon followed where comedians and screenwriters talk about their favorite rom com. Guests have included Before Sunset’s Kim Krizan, Moana’s Pamela Ribon and Dream for an Insomniac’s Tiffanie DeBartolo. Her class, How To Write a Rom Com Outline became a big a hit, drawing in students such as Vogue’s Andew Philip Bevan and Katy Lindenmuth. She’s currently a writing coach for future screenwriters, specializing in helping writers mine through their own love lives to write their own Rom Com. Several of her female centric shorts are featured on WhoHaha, Funny or Die, have been tweeted by Elizabeth Banks, and placed in several short film competitions throughout the country. But her greatest accomplishment remains at age 8 when she taught her guinea pig to roller-skate. Butterscotch died the very next day. www.astanczak.com
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