When a password becomes a comedy sketch

Stevie Martin: the password keeps growing

Stevie Martin plays an account holder trying to choose a password she can remember. Her first attempt is rejected for being too simple; she adds a number, then a symbol, then pauses to rehearse the result. The screen accepts that version only to ask her to type it again. She stares at the empty box, already unsure where she put the symbol.

The joke escalates as she tries to make the password memorable by giving each addition its own little story. By the time she has acted out the story for herself, she has forgotten the ordinary word she started with. Her character’s confident nod at the beginning gives way to a very careful look at the keyboard: the password has become a performance she cannot quite repeat.

Martin and Lola-Rose Maxwell also wrote and perform “When you forget your password,” which British Comedy Guide embeds on its sketch page.

References: British Comedy Guide

Pulenaz: a question from twenty years ago

Pulenaz plays a person recovering an old account who is asked for the answer to a security question she set up twenty years earlier. Her character is certain she knows the answer until she has to decide whether her younger self used the full name, a nickname or the spelling she favoured at the time.

She turns the recovery into a tiny investigation, moving from confident guess to puzzled reenactment of her former self at a keyboard. Each remembered detail makes the answer feel closer and opens another possibility. Finally she finds an old notebook, opens it hopefully and discovers she wrote down the question rather than the answer.

Two different kinds of forgetting

Martin’s sketch makes the new password harder to hold in mind with every addition. Pulenaz’s character already made her choice; the comedy comes from trying to reconstruct the person who made it. Both give a familiar pause at a screen enough room to become a scene.

Sources and attribution

1. British Comedy Guide

   When you forget your passwordPublication date not listed · Recorded Oct 30, 2026