Worldwide Search, Worldwide Joy

Worldwide Search, Worldwide Joy…for Some of Us by Roxanne McDonald

As if the redeeming characteristics of “Last Comic Standing” were not sufficient, the show takes the search around the world!

Some well-regarded critics are not as excited as I am about the return of LCS, saying it is not funny and is therefore just more fodder for the machine that is summer programming. But I welcome this show for its, well, comic relief, as well as for its more streamlined content, especially during the

audition stages.

The format is tight enough—the initial audition segments not too long and the second-leg auditions (performances in front of a comedy club crowd) shared with us in full.

The very nature of the competition content—comedy—lends a particular catharsis that is seldom matched by other reality shows (save “The Next Best Thing” with Elon Gold and Jeffrey Ross as well as Lisa Ann Walker making as many entertaining jokes and plays on words, etc., as we would expect from the comic contestants).

The only thing worth griping about, and this is minor and really has nothing to do with production, is the insipid commercial break promotional interactivities: one would think they could come up with a more creative way to make more money other than to offer a joke straight line and call for people to pay to get the punch line. I mean, even “take my wife…” jokes would be more appealing.

Anyway, “Last Comic Standing” is one of those shows we (some of us, anyway) don’t just jones for but mark and re-mark calendars for…so needful are we of well-edited reality TV and good humor. I mean, come on, naysayers, tell me Ralphie May did not make you pee a little.

So, yeah, Ant is a marginal comic, but then can you not be glad for those like him who are getting some kind of entertainment job as a result of contributing to our viewing pleasure or leisure?

Speaking of Ant, season three brings an additional plus—the judges are former season contestants. Ant, Alonzo Bowden, and Kathleen Madigan make up this season’s panel, and though we might miss Jay Mohr (mostly cause it was fun for so many to make fun of him), Bill Bellamy will offer a freshness as the host…we hope. (Although “marginal” is again the term when we listen to him do his audience warm-up bit…ugh.)

Okay, so the voting scandal (Drew Carey and Brett Butler will tell you what a pissing contest/political ploy that was in season 2) turned off a lot of people. And so there are

rumored less-than-moral activities in production (some say that really bad “comic” who followed the judges from city to city was a plant—and actually an NBC employee).
How much of any reality show can testify as being completely within the bounds of the moral majority ethics and standards? Come, on, it’s TV—this season with a guy in an ape suit moving on to the semi-finals in Vegas.

I even thought it would be interesting if he (Mel Silverback) turned out to be a joke on the judges, to keep them on their toes, etc., etc., as his voice sounded so familiar.

So what? It isn’t and never will be neck-and-neck with Seinfeld. Don’t think it ever purported to.

SirLinksAlot Last Comic Standing links

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