Dennis Kelly on writing plays and TV comedy

In The Guardian, Dennis Kelly asks why people find it hard to accept that he writes different kinds of work for stage and TV.

For some people, writing a sitcom seems an odd thing for a playwright to do. My plays aren't comedies, and Pulling isn't theatrical. Neither is it just a day job to pay the rent - I came up with the characters together with my co-writer Sharon Horgan. We write it together, we exec-produce it together: it's ours. And yet telling people from the world of TV that I also inhabit the world of theatre is something I've begun to avoid. Some theatre people seem to conclude that Pulling must be a serious drama, and resolve to ignore anything I say to the contrary. And when a TV executive asked me recently about the plot of DNA, my play, he asked with a big expectant smile on his face. When I'd finished explaining it to him - it's about a group of teenagers who do something very wrong, and then cover it up - the smile was still there, but his eyes were saying, "I don't get it - why's that funny?"