Television Of The Weak: The Best Pick-Ups Have A Square Edged Design

Time got away from Tucker, so Martin Brown reared his head from seclusion to reveal he's been watching Last Comic Standing.

Last Comic Standing – Semi-Finals, Round 1"
Martin Brown

The difference between actors and comedians is that actors are symmetrical, physically, and comedians are lopsided. Thus, the semi-final rounds of Last Comic Standing are built expressly to pick the 10 most symmetrical comedians in the competition to send to the finals. If you look at the five finalists picked so far, you’ve got a nerd, an old guy, a fat Mexican, a fat old white dude, and a woman who is hot on a scale of comedian to one, but kind of lacking on a scale of one to actress. And yet, each of the finalists is totally television-worthy. You could plug any one of them into a sitcom right now and make a million a thousand dollars. They each have a decent chance of winning, probably have a solid constituency of less-TV-ready audience members in their corners, but none of them are really intriguing enough to root for. So Last Comic Standing is pretty much just a bland and inoffensive competition-based “funny” program. In other words, television.

The finalists are each, though, pretty funny. Or, at least, funny enough. And the15 or so other comedians that competed against them were pretty funny, too. Which begs the question: Would Last Comic Standing be a better show if it just ran the comics’ (edited) sets back to back to back, and got rid of the judges, the host and the competition? Of course it would. But that version of the show would never get on the air. For one thing, by the time it aired for its fourth week, it’d have to include some seriously ugly people, because I’m pretty sure that they used all of their vaguely attractive possibilities for the semi-finals, and that was, what, forty people? That, and nobody wants to watch stand-up comedians on primetime network television unless they all live together in a house and start getting real. And comedians do not get real.

They never get real, because they’re always trying to be funny, and, man, nobody wants to be around someone who’s always trying to be funny. If these guys are smart, they’re simply trying to parlay the exposure from LCS into a part on a sitcom. That’s definitely what Lil’ Rel was aiming for, since he chose to not even do stand-up comedy in his semi-final set, but instead wasted his time doing cheesy characters ripped from the Tyler Perry playbook.

Of course, none of the comedians will actually land a sitcom thanks to Last Comic Standing, and even if they did, host Craig Robinson should be a morality tale to ward them off of taking it. Dude is so bush league as the host of LCS that it’s hard to believe he ever had chops as a stand-up. It’s entirely possible that Robinson was flat-out miscast in his role, that his sense of humor—which thrives on awkwardness and silence—would never have been an appropriate anchor for a variety show. But Robinson isn’t helping himself out by overtly reading off the teleprompter while his unenthusiastic manner comments on how lame the jokes are. Plus, he spends a lot of time using funny voices and making weird faces, and every 4th grader knows, that is not the way to make friends.

Martin Brown, 2010

Comments

[John Pontoon]

Favorite Young Ones moment: Alexei Sayle is holding the four hostage at riflepoint and tells them to get on with whatever, because, "I'm not exactly known for me patience."

Rik: (Snottily. As always.) "Well, I guess you're not Dr. Kildare, then!"

Sayle responds by jacking Rik in the jaw with the rifle butt.

I guess you just had to see it.

[Comics Weekly]

My dread kin and I were raised on this show by inadvertently counter-culture parents. We will still - to this day - recite Neil's "We sow the seeds, nature grows the seeds, we eat the seeds" hippie mantra.

One of the few genuinely punk TV shows.

But don't watch BOTTOM, unless you have a high tolerance for people getting hit with frying pans.

[John Pontoon]

Yeah, somebody once loaned me a videocassette of "Bottom," and I got about 13 minutes in before my will gave up. The dismal non-"Young Ones" career of nearly everyone involved defies all reasonable odds; the only exceptions that come to mind are (obviously) "Absolutely Fabulous" (which scarcely counts despite Jennifer Saunders appearing on a handful of "YO" episodes and being married to Vyvyan,) and a minority of excellent episodes of "The Comic Strip Presents," particularly "A Fistful of Travelers Cheques," the one with Mayall and Peter Richardson (who turned down the role of Mike on "YO") as cowboy wannabes. Contains this great line:

"This is the Hotel Bastardos! You want the soft toilet paper? You go to the Hotel Gayboy! "

Anyhow, yeah, "Young Ones" was a supernova of awesome that burnt the talent out of its principals. Aah, no skin off my ass, I guess.

[Thrills]

Bizarrely, I have only just rewatched the first series of the Young Ones. Is it something in the water?

I am particularly fond of the absolute hatred of the police in the show, who are portrayed in the least subtle ways as thieving racist idiots.

[Abhay]

My favorite Young Ones moment is this tiny, tiny joke-- and I haven't seen the show since it was on Comedy Central so this is just by memory, but where, I think, Mike glances at his watch and some other character goes "Oh, is that the time?" And he goes, "No, time is an abstract concept; this is a wrist-watch."

It's a Douglas Adams joke, basically, but still, it stuck with me...

Bottom, though-- that was not good.

[Zeb]

I really like this:

"You could plug any one of them into a sitcom right now and make a million a thousand dollars."