"People will love something very much or hate something very much. But the great thing about a sketch show is that if something comes along that you don't like, something else will come along in a minute that hopefully you might like that"
About this Quote
Matt Lucas is describing a survival strategy disguised as a feature: fragmentation as crowd control. A sketch show isn’t built to win unanimous approval; it’s built to keep the remote in your hand. By admitting that people will “love” or “hate” a given bit, he’s not hand-wringing about taste so much as acknowledging the brutal math of comedy in a mass culture where everyone arrives with different taboos, triggers, and reference points. The promise isn’t consensus. It’s turnover.
The line “something else will come along in a minute” is doing quiet rhetorical work. It reframes polarization as pacing, a structural solution to the fact that sketches are inherently high-risk experiments: a premise either detonates quickly or it doesn’t. In that sense, Lucas is selling the form’s built-in forgiveness. A bad sketch doesn’t poison the whole meal; it’s just a bite you can spit out before the next course lands. That’s an aesthetic argument, but also a pragmatic one for performers who live online now, where individual sketches get clipped, circulated, and litigated outside their original rhythm.
There’s subtext, too, about accountability and deniability. The rapid succession of bits can feel like creative abundance, but it also lets a show glide past its own misfires: if you offend, the next sketch arrives like a distraction. Lucas frames this as generosity to the audience, yet it’s also a reminder that sketch comedy’s real unit of meaning is not the joke but the sequence - a carousel designed to keep you watching long enough to find “your” laugh.
The line “something else will come along in a minute” is doing quiet rhetorical work. It reframes polarization as pacing, a structural solution to the fact that sketches are inherently high-risk experiments: a premise either detonates quickly or it doesn’t. In that sense, Lucas is selling the form’s built-in forgiveness. A bad sketch doesn’t poison the whole meal; it’s just a bite you can spit out before the next course lands. That’s an aesthetic argument, but also a pragmatic one for performers who live online now, where individual sketches get clipped, circulated, and litigated outside their original rhythm.
There’s subtext, too, about accountability and deniability. The rapid succession of bits can feel like creative abundance, but it also lets a show glide past its own misfires: if you offend, the next sketch arrives like a distraction. Lucas frames this as generosity to the audience, yet it’s also a reminder that sketch comedy’s real unit of meaning is not the joke but the sequence - a carousel designed to keep you watching long enough to find “your” laugh.
Quote Details
| Topic | Funny |
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