Last Comic Standing 5, The Finale: The Fastest Relay of Turtles

Whew! It’s been a bear of a week – what with doing the two-hour premiere of Beauty and the Geek Season Four last night, this two-hour finale of Last Comic Standing and having to work on one of my final Ohio Valley Wrestling reports tomorrow night! Still, I’m here to get out the details of the finale for LCS!

The episode starts off with Bill on stage bringing in the USC Marching Band so that the two finalists, Jon Reep and Lavell Crawford can trot down to the stage. In the audience we can see family members of the two, along with the other finalists from this season. Once on stage, Bill asks them how they feel and before they can get more than two words out, they have to leave as the program has a LOT of filler to zip through in the two hours NBC has given them. Most of it having nothing to do with the two finalists or even LCS, by the way, but by golly they have a lot of it to show viewers!

After a handful of jokes about O.J. and using airport bathrooms after the Craig incident, Bill introduces the guest comics on the show: Carrot Top, Robert Schimmel, Frank Caliendo doing his impression of John Madden, and a special appearance by Dane Cook. But first, a commercial break that leads into Number Ten of what is supposed to be the “Top Ten Biggest Laughs on Last Comic Standing”: It is of Jessica Kirson doing her “Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy” joke. Hmm. “Biggest Laughs,” eh? Oooookay. This is followed up with Alonzo Bodden talking about NASCAR at Number Nine in the list. That’s a little better.

Bill introduces Carrot Top and amazingly Carrot Top has props for his performance! What will this guy think of next?! Carrot Top does a Barry Bond Steroids joke and I have to wonder if Carrot Top should really be the one to make steroid jokes. When Carrot Top finishes, Bill plays with Carrot Top’s baseball bat prop, which makes one wonder if Carrot Top minds people touching his stuff. I don’t have a joke there – I’m just curious, that’s all.

A montage of bad and crazy tryouts from this season brings out the three comics who were the talent scouts for this season: Kathleen Madigan, ANT, and Alonzo Bodden. ANT dominates the conversation with Bill and really lays it on thick, but it’s all a setup for another montage of ANT acting up and mugging for the cameras while telling comics they failed their try-outs. Some readers may remember that there were stories earlier in the year about ANT being really terrible to the comics trying-out, but we didn’t see much at all of that in the early episodes of this season. Collected together in this montage, however, it gives the appearance that this is all that ANT did during the try-outs. As if he didn’t care to find funny comics, but rather just wanted to see how he could play off of them to tell them they sucked. Being an annoying jerk CAN’T be the impression ANT wants to give (really, he can’t be thinking that being snotty is a good career move at this point), but that’s what we get in the clips shown. As the segment ends with the three judges, I note that Alonzo said possibly two sentences the entire time, while ANT seemed upset one time when Kathleen jumped in to respond to a question from Bill before he could say anything. I now have to wonder if some of those horror stories told from earlier in the year might not be true. At least from what we saw on the finale.

Heading into the commercial, Jerry Springer wishes the finalists luck and says that the one who loses will get to be on his show. I would think they would need to get a sister pregnant first before they can have the prerequisite to appear on Springer, however.

The eighth “funniest moment” on LCS is a deserved one with Dave Mordal talking about electric cars and how it must mean that electricity comes from magic! Great stuff. It is followed with Bill introducing a roast for Lavell that was taped a while back. Most probably the idea was to have a good chunk of the finale filled with roasts for the two finalists or perhaps even treat it as a final challenge, but instead all we get is a five-minute chunk full of snippets of the comics telling insults. That’s a big shame, as the list of comics for the roasts is quite interesting: Doug Benson, Todd Glass, Roz, Chris Porter, Alonzo Bodden, Tammy Pescatelli, Rich Vos (gee, what could Rich and Tammy talk about?) and Jeffrey Ross. Their material is funny, albeit mostly fat jokes.

Yet the editing of the piece just has things flying at the viewers with no chance to catch a breath – first it’s Benson making a joke, then there’s another guy! Oh, it’s Todd from Season Two! Wait, now Roz is there. And there’s the Wonka guy. Does Rich even get work anymore? Wait, who’s next? Why are they there and not some of the other comics? Why is Doug the only comic from this season helping out? The roast is just too much at too fast a pace. But they have to do so in order to get in another roast segment, the other guest comics and all the other stuff jammed into the two hours.

Lavell gets up to finish off his part of the roast by getting on both Doug and Todd, who cracked wise about not understanding Lavell half the time. When Lavell tells everyone that they can kiss his ass if they don’t understand him, both Todd and Doug readily get up and do so, which was a nice punchline to Lavell’s joke. Lavell’s response to that isn’t nearly as good, but at least he tried. In the end, Lavell does well for his part, and – since roasts were challenges in the past for the finalists – one has to wonder if that was perhaps the original intent of the roasts for the next-to-last episode and if it just didn’t work out as planned. As it stood, Lavell certainly didn’t do poorly in response to the challenge.

D.L. Hughley is seen wishing the comics luck in a short video message before a commercial break that ends to reveal the Number Seven “funniest moment” being John Heffron talking about his mom cutting his hair. It’s funnier than what I just wrote. Honest. Some puppets are then seen backstage with Jon and Lavell for some damn reason I can’t fathom. But the producers must have thought it was well-worth cutting down the roast segment so that we could see them jabber about nothing in particular as Jon and Lavell look like they got stuck in a sub-par episode of The Muppet Show.

After a review of the season’s challenges – which prove how poor said challenges were this year – the other eight finalists come out to participate in a two-minute-long one-liners challenge. Thankfully, Lavell is not involved in this one. Gina and Ralph do the best of the group, with Matt getting in two variations of the same gag that shows himself off well. As they march off-stage, Bill mentions that people will be able to see the comics perform around the country as part of a tour, and that tour information can be found online right here. That’s a great idea, and one that we suggested here quite a few times over the years. Too bad it couldn’t have happened any earlier than now (or that they’re coming any closer to where we live).

Another video shout-out comes by way of Carson Daly, while the sixth “funniest moment” is that of Todd Glass demonstrating how to smoke while working out. This is all followed by Robert Schimmel coming out to do a few minutes about going to places with his daughter and I have to say that he was the funniest person on during the entire season. Really funny stuff, which unfortunately just makes everyone else who is vying to be named “Last Comic Standing” look pretty pale in comparison.