Odds and ends: Last Comic Standing

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on June 22nd, 2010

Some random musings on our audition/showcase experience and some other thoughts and memories that were dislodged when we watched last night’s episode.

It’s been interesting to monitor the blogosphere, seeing what about the show makes an impression– good and bad.

Seems like a lot of folks are very upset about the blatant “Despicable Me” product placement. (We weren’t paying close attention, as the segment came on just after a segment on The Female Half. While we were analyzing that… we glanced over at the screen to see one of those funny yellow things onstage at Gotham.)

Ohmigod. We watched it again. The look of discomfort on the faces of the judges was contagious. We read one posting somewhere that read, “I turned the show off and I will never watch it again.” Extreme, to be sure, but some folks have a problem with money changing hands and the idea of a movie being promoted within the framework of a television show. Of course, each hour of programming can be stuffed with 22 minutes of slickly-produced commercials, but if the producers of a show decide to shoehorn the product into the show itself (even going the irony route… where everyone involved winks at the camera and tries to escape with dignity), it really inflames a lot of people.

American Idol viewers have become accustomed to seeing their favorite contestants in wacky videos starring Ford Focuses. And they’re even all right with the giant tubs of cokes on the judging table. But they wig when the judges of LCS have to make nice with a silent character from a major motion picture.

We have a different problem with it. With the time wasted on “Despicable Me,” perhaps one more comedian might have been showcased. Or maybe Mike Vecchione and The Male Half could have been shown doing one more joke. Or maybe the beginning of The Female Half’s quote (“I’m a crowd work specialist…”) could have been left intact, thereby giving an entire different meaning to her statement, “…but I’m sort of out of my comfort zone, so I’m just going to pretend the crowd’s not there.” Or maybe they could have left the tag line on one of her jokes (which would have taken all of about four seconds).

We’re puzzled as to why the show finds it so worthwhile to delve into Andy Kindler’s likes and dislikes when it comes to choice of material. We were upset when a print interview with Kindler quoted him as being disgruntled when it came to jokes about the homeless. He was “uncomfortable.” He doesn’t like it. He also said it on camera, on LCS.

This is not a good thing. We’re not sure why we’re treated to Kindler’s personal preferences when it comes to premises. Isn’t Kindler an Alt Comedy God? Are not the Alts noted for being free to choose what they joke about and how they go about it? Do they not represent a vanguard of free-thinking, daring and sometimes offensive performers who have thrown off the bonds that previously held back so many “conventional” comedians? It is more than ironic then that their patron saint be depicted as the Chief of the Premise Police… on a network television show.

And the fans don’t exactly agree with Kindler on this particular point. Indeed, one of the most tweeted and re-tweeted jokes from Episode One was Taylor Williamson‘s bit about the homeless still being able to own cats.

And was it Nikki Glaser who did the joke last night about the concept of love at first sight being the reason she can’t look a homeless person in the eye? Both great jokes. Both make light of the homeless.

Aside from it being somewhat upside down (and somewhat wrong) that a judge (particularly this judge) be so vehement about his dislike of a particular category of jokes, it then sets an odd tone and furthermore taints any enjoyment of jokes that might touch on that premise.

Witness the Jew Montage. Was there really a need for that? Depicting a group of comics as anti-Semitic merely because the happen to mention Jews? We’re puzzled as to why the producers would go out of their way to make a comic (or a group of comics) look bad because of a premise.

We’ve always been vehemently anti-Premise Police. Someone making a homeless joke– a clever joke that hinges on one participant or another being homeless– is doing nothing wrong. Thousands of jokes have been written that mention Jews and that weren’t automatically anti-Semitic. Indeed, Kindler himself has done it countless times. If a line is drawn arbitrarily and a whole topic is declared off-limits, we are poorer for it. We’re reminded of the comedy club or casino patron who bitches loudly to the club manager (or, in rare cases, to the comic himself) that he “doesn’t like it when the comedian makes jokes about (fill in the blank).” This person is usually regarded as a crank. And rightfully so.

Perhaps it would have served the audience and the comedians better if a montage were concocted that actually showed multiple comedians each doing a joke on one topic or subject. It might serve to reinforce the notion that there are a multitude of different approaches and that comedians, despite their similarities, think in radically different ways and take a unique approach. (We recall a show on Comedy Central, Standup Standup, that was based on that very premise. It didn’t make the comics look like monkeys.)

Do they really expect the best comedians in America to show up for auditions in subsequent seasons if the possibility exists that they might be unfairly included in a sequence whose only aim is to portray professional comics as anything other than funny, clever and creative?

And we can’t say this often enough: Lose the montages of the weirdos. Are we still suffering from the Jonathan Winters effect all these years? Winters suffered a mental breakdown in 1960 or so. Some reports say that he spent the better part of eight months in mental facilities while recovering and was later diagnosed as bipolar. Bipolarity was a bigger deal fifty years ago. But, it’s quite possible that, until that incident, comics were not regularly associated with mental illness. And it’s also quite possible that fifty years later, we’re still associated with it. And that montages like the ones that enable the viewer to leer at some folks who are quite possibly delusional reinforce the notion. And another good argument for dropping these compilations: The public doesn’t actually seem taken by them. The blogosphere is rather silent on them… as are the Tweets… and the Facebook chatter and the various forums and chatboards. And when they are mentioned, it is in passing or negatively.

People, oddly enough, seem to like the jokes.