Modified On June 2, 2008
Cory Kahaney is 0 for 2 on reality TV shows– the LCS alum was the first chef eliminated from the Food Network’s Next Food Network Star (see posting below).
We were wondering why she wasn’t showing up in any of the promos that aired in the runup to tonight’s premiere. She was pre-disappeared!
Food Net star Alton Brown led the hopefuls through their first challenge– stand in front of the camera and, in one sentence, summarize their approach, their cooking philosophy. Kahaney froze. She admits as much in the voiceover. And she goofed up some words.
In the subsequent challenges and in her on-camera appearances, she was neither engaging nor particularly humorous.
This was a puzzlement to the show’s host. At one point she was asked (by Brown or by Flay, we don’t recall), and we paraphrase, “Are you going to be funny?”
At show’s end, Kahaney is bounced. In the post-mortem, Kahaney says she didn’t think that she had to be funny all the time. Which may be true. But, from what we saw (which, we acknowledge, was edited), she wasn’t funny any of the time.
Let’s face it, culinary this-and-that degree notwithstanding, she only found herself on the show– among all the other fancily-degreed cooking experts– because she was a semi-famous standup comic who could also cook. So, the expectation might have been that she work a little bit of humor in here or there. Maybe. Just a little. A teaspoon or two. Perhaps a pinch. It might be that when she failed to live up to the others’ expectations, she made passing onto the next level of competition impossible.
We comics occasionally fall into the trap that has us believing that, since we regularly do one of the hardest things that anyone can do, we can automatically switch hats and do something totally unrelated and do it as well as we do the standup. We get points for gumption. But we gotta know that it will occasionally lead to utter, public, crashing failure. Sometimes the skills don’t translate as well as we might hope. Quite often, there’s a learning curve that is similar to that which we experienced when we originally took up the microphone.