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->''"We think old Bill's too stuffy, he needs to loosen,\\
So we take his boring plays and we reduce 'em!\\
The poetry, the subplots, the imagery that's illing,\\
And we get right down to the sex and killing!"''
-->--"'''We Take It OTT (The RSC)'''" from ''The Reduced Shakespeare Radio Show''

The Reduced Shakespeare Company is an American comedy group founded by Daniel Singer, with the initial members being himself, Adam Long, and Jess Borgeson (today Creator/JessWinfield). They specialise in taking vast bodies of work (not limiting themselves to [[Creator/WilliamShakespeare Shakespeare]]), that would take days to see in their entirety, whittling them down to the bare essentials, then whittling them down a bit further and filling the gaps with jokes. They arguably invented TheAbridgedSeries formula, also heavily employing TheAbridgedHistory.

Their members can be blamed for producing these plays:
* ''[[Theatre/TheCompleteWorksOfWilliamShakespeareAbridged The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)]]''
* ''The Complete History of America (abridged)''
* ''[[Theatre/TheBibleTheCompleteWordOfGodAbridged The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged)]]''
* ''The Complete Millennium Musical (abridged)''
* ''All the Great Books (abridged)''
* ''Completely Hollywood (abridged)''
* ''The Complete World of Sports (abridged)''
* ''Franchise/StarWars Shortened''
* ''Series/{{Lost}} Reduced'' - Covers the first five seasons, and was televised before the sixth season premiere.
* ''The Ring Reduced'' - Televised as part of Creator/Channel4's Music/RichardWagner season.
* ''Shakespeare's Long Lost First Play (abridged)'' - An amalgam of all the plays, supposedly written before he had the idea of separating them out.

They also made ''The Reduced Shakespeare Radio Show'' for Creator/TheBBC World Service, which was ''The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)'' reformatted into six half-hour radio episodes (examples for the radio show are currently placed in the main Shakespeare show's page). Although not strictly RSC shows, founder Adam Long made four Reduced-style quarter-hour shows for BBC Radio 4 about [[UsefulNotes/BritishPoliticalSystem British politics]] under the title ''The Condensed History of...'' (the three main parties and Big Ben).
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