Modified On July 11, 2008
We’re in Vegas, gigging at the Riv, so we’re on Pacific Time, we’ve got two shows tonight and we’ve got no access to a VCR. And we’re unable to configure our Slingbox so that we could watch it from the road on our laptop!
Erstwhile SHECKYmagazine columnist Dan French will guest blog tonight– He’ll give his analysis of this evening’s episode of Last Comic Standing!
Dan’s latest project is IWorkWithStandups.com. French describes it thusly: “The idea of all of this is to give mid-level comics the same resources high level comics get– pro writing and producing help.”
Here is, Dan French’s take on last night’s episode:
Okay, here we go. Last Comic Standing, Ep. 8, I’m Dan French, sitting in Austin, Texas, just put the kids to bed, now it’s time to crank through the DVR, get my chew on and say what all went down on LCS, or as I call it, the most reviled primetime exposure in the business!
First up, Bill Bellamy wore suits, sport jackets, pants, shirts, all sorts of stuff. Thank God he’s skinny, the wardrobe lady would be near-dead if he was built like a real comic. To me Bellamy is an unevil. No, he’s not funny, but neither is he a totally clueless actor with no idea that he’s even near comedy. There are worse, we all know it, so give him his check and a peck on the cheek, thanks, Bill, see you and your somewhat smooth, somewhat forced faux excitement for as long as we can keep this horse on the air!
Tonight’s episode was the first vote out, and the search for a suitable spot for a comedy kick-in-the-throat? A graveyard! Wait, who was the first one with the “I killed” joke? Not me, I stopped it right behind my “And I thought Jim Tavare was stiff” quip.
A graveyard? Eh, whattaya gonna do? They wouldn’t use any real comic haunts, the strip club, the grocery after the Thursday show, the sticky condo, the reeking hotel room. So I guess a cemetery is as good as any. Although it did make Sean Cullen look even creepier than usual. Those eyes, my friend. You can just see them slowing edging up over the windowsill of a sorority dorm in Des Moines.
Okay, enough crackery. What happened?
Before I get the down and dirty, some context. I think what makes LCS so odd to watch for comics is the add-in television production structures that compete with the lean, honed aesthetic of live standup. A good live club eliminates anything that distracts from the comic, lets the focus settle clearly on the stage, and the magic all happens within the small confines of a spotlight, one angle of vision, and a single microphone. It’s about real, or pretty close to real, intimacy between live human beings.
None of which works on TV. TV is the ultimate glitz and shift medium. It entertains not through singularity, but through things like density and speed. Constantly changing camera angles, sound shifts, color changes, music cues, emotional spikes, multiple characters. Watch your TV from the side some night with the lights out; it literally blinks on and off, forcing you to visually focus on it.
Okay, besides the fact that I love to get all analytic about my standup, this all brings me to why Iliza Shlesinger won tonight’s joke off over Esther Ku and God’s Pottery. She was more TV comedy friendly. On a few important criteria– comedy density, comedy variety, and sex appeal.
For comedy density, she has way, way, way more punches than the other two acts combined. She rolled out linguistically complex images, diatribes, nicks, pops, roll-ins, and any other term I can make up that says she had a fully matured standup text to work with. Esther Ku? Thin broth, my friends. Very few punches, and those she had weren’t strong enough to hang in the air as she cupie-dolled around trying to milk laughter from tiny jokes. What she did wasn’t awful, it was just thin. Same for God’s Pottery. Other than the visual punch of how they look and mug, they took forever to get to jokes, and the song was nowhere near laced with the type of dense punchery that works so well in televised standup.
But that isn’t why God’s Pottery lost. They lost because there was so little variety to what they did. It’s not a bad schtick, it’s just a schtick you can predict very easily after about a minute of it. And the fact that they never broke character at any time during the show? Egads. Egads, fellas. E. Gad. S. Give us some variety. The characters aren’t going anywhere if we get to see somethin’ different for fifteen seconds. It just wore as time went on.
Iliza had lots of variety in her set. She did voices, characters, act outs. She moved. She changed vocal tones. She had varied emotions. Her content won’t put her on anybody’s favorite writer list, but at least it was a good representative of all the variety standup packs into its small space. Esther Ku? Hello, Kitty. Been seeing it now for a long time. you’ve got to give us more than a single note if you’re on television.
Last reason she won? Iliza? Hot. Sorry, there it is. Hot. And a competent comic. Watch out. Yes, she’s playing the unlikable card a bit, and yes, she’s grousy and is like that grindy girlfriend you just can’t keep happy, but she’s hot and comic competent. Tough cards to beat, dudes still in the house.
She could… go… all… the…
Last pip, one thing I sort of like is when they go to a makeshift greenroom where the comics got to do a little of what comics really do – rake each other bloody for flaws in our acts, or crutches we lean on to get crowd response. It was the closest you’re going to get to seeing real comedy on this show, instead of seeing comics doing “televisiony” things like getting “excited” about performing in ways you know they hate down in the basement of their souls – ie, the dozens while dressed like a boxer?
What I noticed about this, though, is what I notice about a lot of comics who do LCS. They don’t quite understand how to make the transition from live stage comic to comic who can win a TV show. They all basically picked God’s Pottery or Esther Ku because they know the power novelty/cartoon acts have with live audiences. But remember, it’s TV. Any cartoonish act is going to be judged, at least subconsciously, against real cartoons. I could pop over to Cartoon Network and see tons of Born Again parodies and Asian stereotyping, at a level and speed and even creativity that makes Ku and Pottery seem pretty weak.
I can’t, though, pop over and see hot blonde who’s good with words turn and shake her butt at me while delivering a pretty acceptable joke.
That’s good standup television. In Dan’s book.
End o’ blog. Back to my friends, the Amazing Sheckyians and Their Dancing Online Magazine Monkey we should all appreciate so much. This stuff is a lot of work.