Engagement Stunts

This skit pokes fun at men who always feel like they have to make a big production out of their engagements; whether it be flashing “Will you marry me?” on the Jumbotron at sporting events, skywriting a proposal, or handing that special girl an engagement ring whilst both are plummeting to earth with parachutes strapped to their backs. With each passing year, these “stunts” seem to be getting more and more elaborate. Of course with so many moving parts in these proposals, so many things can (and will) go disastrously wrong for these men. That’s because they aren’t highly trained professionals like Evel Knievel (1938-2007). Leave the engagement stunts to the experts, guys.
Although his most famous stunts ended with crash landings such as his jump over the Caesar’s Palace fountain in 1967, the Snake River Canyon Skycycle jump in 1974, and his 1975 Wembley Stadium jump (the subject of this skit), Mr. Knievel was never deterred from jumping back on his Harley Davidson XR-750 and trying again. Mr. Knievel in fact paved the way for many of his daredevil successors, including his son Robbie (1962-2023), who, incidentally, “avenged” his father by nailing a successful landing at the Caesar’s Palace fountain in 1989.
The "Engagement Stunts" sketch was the sketch that inspired the “Acceptance Spee” sketch. It wasn’t until after CoBaD recorded the “Engagement Stunts” sketch that we realized that it didn’t go over five minutes at all. We suspect that the sketch ran over five minutes in the 2021 online comedy sketch writing class because that was a first read. The pace of first reads always goes slow because readers don’t know what to expect. So even if the five minute rule for sketches was a sensible one, cutting material based on the first read is a really bad idea as it only discourages comedy writers and makes the skit subject to unnecessary edits, forcing possibly good content to be needlessly thrown away. Inspiration always comes from the strangest places.
Incidentally, one of the students present at the 2021 reading was dialing in from Topeka, Kansas. Topeka, Kansas is the home of the Evel Knievel Museum. It just goes to show you that no matter what the subject is, there's always someone in the audience who gets the jokes.