Last Comic Standing and cognitive dissonance

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on June 21st, 2010

We watched Last Comic Standing. It has been 91 days since we were involved in the audition and showcase that was (ostensibly) depicted in tonight’s episode. That’s a lot of waiting. A lot of waiting and keeping the trap shut.

We’ve been talking about our experience on that day, March 22, since then. We go over the details. We try to recall what we said, what we did, what we’d do differently, what we’d do again. We’ve dissected it and analyzed it and we made a few stabs at writing about it in long form (which resulted in an opus that will post shortly after 1 AM EDT).

But it’s mondo bizarro to see the footage from that day sliced and diced (and mixed in with footage shot two days prior!) and then presented as one day’s chain of events. (That’s right, possums: For last week’s episode and this week’s episode, they took hours of footage from the Saturday, March 20 audition/showcase and the March 22 audition/showcase and they melded them and presented them as having taken place… well… let’s give them a break. They never really did say that all of that happened on one day.)

Anyway, it’s disconcerting to see vivid video of your day interpolated with a video record of someone else’s day… and then smoothly edited together and presented as one seamless day. It probably causes tiny, irreparable bits of damage to the neurons. It probably tears ever so slightly at our ability to distinguish between reality and make-believe.

We’re stunned by how many comics– tremendous comics– who were on our showcase but who didn’t make it onto the final edit. It should have/could have been a two-hour show, so strong was the group we found ourselves in. So we’re grateful for any facetime that we did get.

We can’t imagine what it’s like to trudge through that day– that grueling, exhausting and, at times, dispiriting day– and not end up with at least a five- or six-second shot on the primetime version. Especially after sweating over the whole affair for ninety days.

We dreaded watching. But, to use the ol’ car wreck analogy, we couldn’t look away. We had to watch… and we’ll have to watch again– we had a VCR recording the show, old school… and we had a Hauppauge 950Q recording it digitally on one of the laptops. So… we’ve got it in two different media. And we’re going to have to watch it again. And again. And we’re going to excerpt it and incorporate it into a “reel.” (So that means we’ll watch it, in Adobe Premiere, hundreds more times, while we edit it.)

The texts and the emails and the Facebook messages and wall postings have been gratifying. (And we suspect that such social media weren’t part of the experience for many LCS contestants from seasons past.) And we’re still waiting for a wavelet or two from viewers in the Mountain and Pacific time zones.

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