Modified On September 20, 2007
It’s official. Jon Reep is the winner of this season’s Last Comic Standing. (The Male Half picked Reep to take it all from the very beginning.) We congratulate Mr. Reep and we also congratulate Mr. Crawford and all the folks who appeared on the show this season.
The two-hour finale was… two hours!
Bellamy Bill looked like a wishbone wrapped in aluminum foil. The two-hour extravaganza managed to pack about 20 minutes of actual watchable television into a 120-minute slot. It’s television magic! Bellamy Bill’s hosting was particularly mediocre tonight, making us even more depressed that he’s returning to host in ’08. The man has no sense of drama or pacing. He’s all one-note. He starts out with adrenalin squirting from his ears and, by the end, he’s still screaming, only by this time, we don’t care any more. This is the exact opposite of what a host should do.
We thought that LCS was capable of making only comics look bad. Tonight, they managed to make the USC Marching Band look bad. The USA Marching Band! How did they manage that?! They sounded like holy hell as they marched into the theater!
Carrot Top crushed! The copper-haired prop comic has been hustling lately– on the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, Mind Freak, the Flavor Flav Roast on Comedy Central– perhaps it’s necessary to pack the Luxor. Whatever the reason, he crushes in each appearance and tonight was certainly no exception. He deserves credit, considering all the snarky things that are said about him in greenrooms (and even on talkshows!)– he comes out, time after time, with new material, and slays.
Robert Schimmel came out and did perhaps the darkest set in the show’s history, and, quite possibly, in the history of primetime.
Sprinkled throughout the broadcast were The Top Ten Biggest Laughs on LCS– counting down by showing ten separate bits from ten different comics. Who hell chose these bits? We’ve seen these comics do much funnier bits than the ones they trotted out tonight. We’ve seen them do them on this very show! It’s not like there was some sort of licensing problem! It is truly mystifying.
One particularly agonizing segment was the One-Liners thing they did– lining up the Bottom Eight and setting the clock at 2:00, then having each comic in turn do a one-liner. Nothing makes a comic look better, huh?! It was excruciating and pointless but, at least it made the comics look incompetent! (And that, after all, seems to be the point of the show this evening.)
To quote Ant, “Somebody has to tell the truth.” One lackluster segment had the three Celebrity Talent Scouts from this season lined up onstage on stools, being “interviewed” by Bellamy Bill, interspliced with a few video clip strolls down memory lane. The loving tribute to Ant merely re-affirmed the truth– He might be the luckiest person in show business.
Dane Cook swaggered onto the stage (after we were shown a short clip from “Good Luck Chuck”) and said some nice things about the two finalists. But… he didn’t do any standup! He’s a movie star now! This had to be delicious for him. All the abuse he’s taken from the standup community fades to a faint memory as the man is invited to appear on LCS, just before the exciting climax– representing the current pinnacle of standup success; representing standup itself!– and all he has to do is say some nice things about the two comic who “have a bright future ahead of them!” And then… Exit! Stage right!
The roast was hacked into two segments– one devoted to roasting Crawford, one to roasting Reep. It was taped September 11, so they had seven days to hack it into bits and slap it all back together again into it’s final, sorry form. The comics were all funny, but the editing ripped the balls off of the affair and sucked a lot of the interest out of it. Next time, more roast, fewer puppets!
Now… what is the deal with the fucking puppets?!? It’s the biggest night of your life… now you have to talk to foul-mouthed puppets backstage. What is with TV producers that they feel the need to wedge puppets into every other project? It’s like a sickness. Every every other project you say? Damn near. The reason you don’t see them in everything from the nightly news to the farm report is that, eventually folks come to their senses and lose the puppets. But they try. Heck, the first season of Saturday Night Live had puppets! It’s never funny and it just brings the proceedings to a screeching halt. Enough already with the puppets!
It is hoped that, lame as this season was, it inspires the folks at home to go to a comedy club (or a casino, or a theater) and see comedy the way it should be seen– Live the way it is meant to be seen. Nothing else compares to it. Sit in the front row. Go often. See your favorites, see someone you’ve never heard of before. Just go and see it.