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Originally aired on Tuesday, June 6, 2006
Written By BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Episode Rating: ** (2 stars out of 5)
Episode Overview: After the nationwide talent search, twenty comics - half of those selected, will each perform three minute sets in front of a live audience. The audience will then select five of the twenty to go to the Last Comic Standing house.
Episode Highlights:
- New host Anthony Clark seems a little stiff...or seems to need a stiff drink to loosen him up!
- The twenty candidates seem to be fairly evenly-matched with no major standouts but no real flops.
- The audience makes its choice, and the top five now advance to the Last Comic Standing House.
Recap:
Last Comic Standing has been resurrected after flaming out in Season Three, but it's too soon to tell whether or not NBC made the right decision whether by themselves (in the form of ratings) or by us (in the form of actual entertainment).
Jay Mohr is still listed in the credits as a Consultant, but is no longer the host. His successor is Anthony Clark, who is probably best known as the lead in the CBS sitcom "Yes, Dear." Anthony Clark has done stand-up, so I was initially expecting something like Mohr's easy swagger in front of the audience. But Clark seems as stiff and uncomfortable as nearly every other reality host, and seemed incapable of deviating from the teleprompter, so the show was not off to a good start.
There are three guest "talent scouts" (aka judges): sitcom guru Garry Marshal, SNL alum Tim Meadows, and comic/notorious D-Lister Kathy Griffin. (I believe her Bravo show season premiere aired at the same time as this show. She really DOES work that D-List hard!)
Ultimately, though, it's the show's live audience that will determine the winner. Much like the American Idol judges, these talent scouts are ultimately powerless.
The live show will have twenty comics performing for three minutes each. Obviously, the television show will not be able to show all of the full performances, and here's where Last Comic Standing's structure is flawed. Reality shows need to edit things into a tight timeline to keep the drama moving. But performance shows generally need to show the full performances in order for the home audience to know what the fuss is all about.
This is especially true with comedy. Sure, some comedians just tell jokes, one after another, and you can just edit out one joke and you get the gist. But other comics build stories or rely on repetitive gags and what can sound like a lame punch line out of context can be hysterical if you heard the other two minutes leading up to it.
But in order to only spend two evenings whittling the forty down to ten, edited gags will be what we have to get through. It's to be hoped that they will show full performances once the group gets down to a manageable size.
Some highlights from the twenty performers are:
Chris Porter - a tall gangly young man who does an extended riff bashing France; he loses track of time and his mike is cut in the middle of his sentence.
Roz - she has a long bit about being a career counselor who helped prostitutes translate their - ahem - skills into resume-appropriate corporate-speak. The edited bits we saw didn't seem, to me, to be especially funny, but the audience seemed to eat it up.
Saleem - a large man who is sharply humorous but with an easy, almost off-handed delivery and natural confidence in front of the audience.
Josh Blue - young guy who looks a little like a fairer Screech from Saved by the Bell. Josh has Cerebral Palsy and much of his act is about how the world responds to that.
Nikki Glazer - a cute 21-year-old blond, she goes the Sarah Silverman route and makes a rape joke. I'm not sure Last Comic Standing is the right venue for that kind of humor...and I'm not sure anyone BUT Sarah Silverman could pull it off anyway.
Wild Willy Parsons - older biker guy whose spent time in jail; he's engaging and Kathy Griffin thinks he's won the crowd over.
The group of twenty, as a whole, was generally consistent, with only a few true clunkers in the group.
After they all perform, the audience selects the first group of five who will be going to the Last Comic Standing house. They are Chris Porter (which is impressive considering he ran out of time), Roz, Josh Blue, April Macie and Joey Gay.
Next week, another twenty will take the stage, and of those, another five will be selected as the best of that bunch. The ten comics will then go to their Last Comic Standing house, and possibly will be joined by an eliminated comic selected by online voters.
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