The Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival is proud to announce the 2022 recipients of The Sketch Comedy Project Fund. This year four projects were awarded funding, each representing an important “next step” in the careers of their participants. The Sketch Comedy Project Fund is made possible through the generous support of The Pat and Tony Adams Freedom Fund for the Arts.
2022 SCPF RECIPIENT PROJECTS:
A group photo of 12 cast members, with a crudely draw stick figure with a photoshopped face on top. A arrow pointing at the face reads “Kevin”.
A Filmed Sketch Revue
Five troupes – Cheap Wine, His Shorts My Pants, Stupid Hot, Banana Room, and High Taste Buds – come together to create A Filmed Sketch Revue. The project will be a collection of sketches with a cohesive through-line.
“We are absolutely thrilled to have been chosen for this fund. It’s going to help us up our production game and support our distribution efforts. A Filmed Sketch Revue is a collaborative project which brings together comics and troupes from in and around Toronto to produce a cohesive sketch show, as a collective, which has a throughline that weaves throughout the film. It’s a dream project which we hope to expand on in the next iteration, bringing in more writers and performers from around the city (follow us and stay tuned for a Call for Scripts if you’d like to be a part of the next one!). “
Two Black Smith cast members against a blue background, all with a wavy digital filter. Text reads “Black Smith Sketch Comedy”.
BLACK SMITH
From the mind of two brothas, Emeka Agada and Lewis G, comes a digital sketch comedy series filled with real characters, raw jokes and a poke at everyday situations that we find ourselves saying “these motherf@#$%s” time and time again.
“A wise man once said: “I’ll be back”, that same person also said “EAUGH!”.
We at Black Smith are happy to be back for another season and can’t wait for fans to get down with what’s to come, eaugh!!
We would like to thank TOsketchfest for selecting us to be one of recipients of this years project fund. Last year we released our first season to a warm reception and couldn’t stop thinking about how we could extend things. As we head into our sophomore season, we are focused on creating more funny and not having our water cut off…at least until we finish shooting.
Smith’s Out”
A pink and purple circle with white text that reads Don Valley Girls.
Don Valley Girls: The Digital Series
Why stop at live sketch domination when we can be in households around the world? That’s right, Don Valley Girls are coming to the small screen soon! Or at least, that’s the plan: Shoot a two sketch proof-of-concept for our sketch comedy web series in two days in May 2023.
“We’re thrilled to be one of the recipients for the 2022 Sketch Comedy Project Fund! We’re excited to develop and shoot a proof-of-concept for DON VALLEY GIRLS: THE DIGITAL SERIES. This represents the next step for us because we all want to do it all: act, write, and create our own projects. We’ve seen how sketch shows like Baroness von Sketch, Kids in the Hall, and SCTV have launched careers into the stratosphere. We also want to be launched into the stratosphere (or at least to the moon).”
Một Tô Phở Hoàn Hảo, or: A Perfect Bowl of Pho
Currently spearheaded by a team of artists called Send Noods Productions, “A Perfect Bowl of Pho” is a 12-scene Vietnamese Canadian musical sketch show about food that cosplays as a Respectable Piece of Theatre, having ascended from its amateur origins at UofT to a presentation by fu-GEN Theatre Company and publication by Playwrights Canada Press. The Sketch Comedy Project Fund will be used to translate the text to Vietnamese, to use as surtitles on future performances of the existing English-language script, or for a future full-Vietnamese-or-mixed-language production outright.
“It’s been a long-time goal of the Pho team to make our show more accessible and appealing to the Viet community in Canada, and the Sketch Comedy Project Fund will help us make a huge step in doing so by translating the text to Vietnamese for use as surtitles in future productions. Sketch has an esteemed history in our diaspora – just ask your Viet friends about Paris by Night – and we’re really grateful for the opportunity to work in that same spirit.”
2023 Sketch Comedy Project Fund
The 2023 Sketch Comedy Project Fund opens once again in Spring 2023. If you’ve got an ensemble-based comedy project that represents the next step in your collective careers, consider making an application!
Program criteria, objectives and outline can be found here.
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