<div id="subtitle">The genre-hopping joys of Last Comic Standing.</div><div><p><h1>Standing Down</h1> <p>The genre-hopping joys of <em>Last Comic Standing.</em> </p> <p>By Amber Bryer-Wotte,  August 24, 2008</p> <p>Part fly-on-the-wall, part talent search, and part elimination game, Last Comic Standing is a perfect example of the new hybrid of reality TV shows that mix a variety of the genre’s standard formats. That’s why I’d never watched it before this season: I like my reality television like I like my men: simple and unchallenging, with a straightforward, predictable narrative. Reality TV is, after all, where I turn to get away from the chaos and complexity of actual reality, where in my experience, men are neither straightforward nor predictable.</p> <p>So call me a grumpy purist, but I prefer reality TV to stick with one concept at a time. Fly-on-the-wall? Give me eight strangers picked to live in a house, add booze, a hot-tub, and some cameras, and stand back. Talent search? Give me the best karaoke singers this country has to offer, slap some makeup on the ugly ones, some platform heels on the others, and let Paula Abdul sputter non-sequiturs all competition long. Elimination game? Give me gross-out challenges that require no skill or interpersonal drama whatsoever, and—let’s be honest—optimally no redeeming social value: In other words, Fear Factor!</p> <p>But much to my dismay, the single-format reality show has gone the way of Temptation Island and stumbled drunkenly off to that big syndicated paradise in the sky.</p> <p>Hence my foray into Last Comic Standing, a summer stalwart for NBC since 2003 that has produced such household-name stand-up comedians as Dat Phan, John Heffron, Alonzo Bodden…okay, that has produced some dudes you’ve never heard of and never will. Comics in Season 6 were competing for $250,000, a Honda Pilot, an appearance in Bally’s Las Vegas’s renowned topless revue, Jubilee!, and an EXCLUSIVE (!!!) talent contract with NBC —also known as the promise of a life of indentured servitude to the peacock network.</p> <p>That’s what the show’s contestants were competing for—and by competing, I mean participating in a variety of highly contrived challenges to avoid being eliminated. The challenges—which proved to be hilariously unfunny—included a car wash, a trip to Bed Bath and Beyond with none other than Carrot Top, story time at the Playboy Mansion with The Girls Next Door (who have a reality show of their own), and a superhero costume contest. The lack of humor in the challenges was, somewhat counter intuitively, actually the funniest thing about them. But on a show hosted by washed-up MTV personality Bill Bellamy, I somehow don’t think subtlety or irony is what they were going for.</p> <p>Those who avoided elimination would move on, and the others would head back to a life of snagging the occasional gig at the Laugh Factory, starring in YouTube videos, and trying to up-sell the couple at table twelve on a second bottle of wine.</p> <p>The final twelve contenders get sent to live in a house in LA to find out what happens when comedians stop being funny…and start being real. Just one problem: They stop being funny, but they don’t stop trying to be funny.</p> <p>It was a little disturbing, for example, that God’s Pottery, a comic team whose shtick is being “a Christian acoustic folk duo…with a message!” never once stepped out of character. In the “yo momma” joke smackdown challenge, it was funny: “Your mother is so pretty, we were just talking, and we think she could be a model;” “Your mother is so funny that when she tells a joke, we could just die laughing—which is fine, because we’re going to heaven.” But watching them inflict their endless Up-With-Jesus routine on ten other people trapped in a house, I wondered if they weren’t making a long stopover in purgatory first.<br /> </p><p> </p> <p>So there it is: just a typical elimination-showdown, special-living-environment, fly-on-the-wall, talent-competition show. That’s a hefty genre load for a format purist like myself, but I was hooked anyway. Why? Because this year’s competition implicitly asked a question that often preoccupies me: Are women funny?</p> <p>My gut reaction to the question has always been a reluctant but qualified “No.” Like the perfect pair of jeans, funny women are hard to find, and you still may get them home and decide they aren’t quite right. It took me watching two seasons of Kathy Griffin’s My Life on the D-List to decide that I don’t, in fact, think she’s very funny as a person.</p> <p>That’s why it was exciting—or complete baloney, depending on your perspective—that the winner of Season 6 was a chick. (I suppose I should feign journalistic integrity here by calling full disclosure: I went to high school with the winner, Miss Iliza Shlesinger, who was a freshman when I was a senior. Really though, it isn’t journalistic integrity; I just want you to be impressed that I know her.)</p> <p>Now Iliza is not just a woman, but a cute woman, a group notorious for lacking both personality and comedic acumen. No one considered her a threat, despite the fact that she sent four other acts packing by overwhelming margins during eliminations.</p> <p>It helps that observational comedy now dominates the stand-up world. This works well for women, because what they lack in natural comedic skill they more than make up for in their ability to perceive and pick apart others’ flaws; the trick to finding funny women is to find those who—like Iliza—don’t mind turning the judgment on themselves.</p> <p>When women who can be effectively described as “hot chicks”—and yes, I’m talking here about Iliza—do it, it’s even better. Women like seeing hot chicks knock themselves down a peg, and men like to know that unattainable as they may be, smokin’ hot chicks with, ahem, “good personalities” are out there, even if your odds of ever meeting such a creature are about as good as stumbling upon the Battle at Kruger with a camera.</p> <p>Whether Iliza’s win will herald in a new era of female observational comics remains to be seen. As she herself said after finding out she’d won, “It’s not so much about being a girl, it’s about being a funny comic.”</p> <p>Similarly, for reality TV, the trick isn’t to avoid genre crossing entirely—it’s simply to keep from doing it arbitrarily. Last Comic Standing shows that the multi-genre format can work, but producers must choose—and choose wisely—which genres they mash-up. No one wants to see beautiful people looking ugly, or stupid people looking smart, or comedians who aren’t being funny. I just hope that everyone involved in the production of The Mind of Mencia can take that last observation to heart.<br /><br /> </p></p><img src="http://admatch-syndication.mochila.com/images/ad.gif?aid=38428797&bid=informcom" /></div><div id="copyright"><div>

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