Last Comic Standing, Episode 8: The Dragon Sleeps Tonight

It has been an interesting week for the show, which will be the last that takes place completely inside the house and featuring a challenge between two of the participants. Next week, the five remaining comics will perform for an audience in Las Vegas, and the home viewers will get a chance to vote for who they think should be the Last Comic Standing.

Last Comic Standing continued to be strong in the ratings last week, increasing the number of viewers to 8.1 million. One drawback, however, was that it was a very busy week for network television, compounded by the fact that Last Comic Standing had to go up against the All-Star Game on Fox. Because of that, even though viewership was up, the program ended in second place in the Tuesday night ratings for the first time in its run and was in 25th place in the overall ratings for the week. Still, nothing to cry about, as Fox doesn’t have an All-Star Game to use as competition every week.

Reactions from viewers show that there is still some confusion as to what is happening with the show in the next couple of weeks. As many readers may recall, the show had always been advertised as being an eight-week commitment (and therefore only eight one-hour episodes long). Since the show has taken off, it had been decided to expand the final number of the episodes, leading to two more episodes being added to the series this season.

So what will be happening in the next two weeks? July 23rd will see the filming of the finals, where the five finalists will compete in front of an audience at Paris Las Vegas (that's Paris Las Vegas, not THE Paris Las Vegas . . . kind of like the age-old argument about “is it Batman or THE Batman”). That is a free show, so it'll be a hard show to get into at the last minute. This show will be filmed and edited for broadcast on July 29 in the usual NBC timeslot (and then repeated on Comedy Central). Viewers at home will then be able to then be able to vote for which of the five they believe to be the funniest.

The following week on August 5th, from what we understand, NBC will be airing a live two-hour special from Paris Las Vegas. During that special, the winner picked by the viewers will be announced. No doubt the show will showcase memorable moments from the series and further interview segments from all of the ten finalists. In fact, we'll be announcing something big about that final show here next week, so check back with us then for more details.

Speaking of Paris Las Vegas and Last Comic Standing, for those of you who are going to see the show filmed on July 23, you may want to stick around to see Jay Mohr himself perform his act when he appears at there on July 25 through the 27. You can click here for details about his shows.

Meanwhile, lots of rumors were hitting the airwaves and the internet as to who the final five will be for the show. All for naught, really. Nearly all of them have been just guesswork, with a tendency to pick the comics that have always been guessed as being part of the final five anyway (namely, Ralphie and Rich). If the rumors had been printed two weeks ago, no doubt Dave Mordal would have been in that list as well, so the rumors did little to spoil this week’s episode.

Which leads us right into what occurred on the program tonight:

After a brief recap showing the friction between Dat and Dave, and their subsequent “Comedy Warehouse” challenge where Dat was the victor, the group is shown saying their goodbyes to Dave. Everyone except Dat, that is, who stands off on his own telling the camera that “everyone was shocked” that he had beaten Dave. He wonders how he will live with “these lunatics for the next two days.” “God help me,” he quips, as he heads to the short bus for the trip home.

Everyone looks depressed on the bus, including Dat. Rich tries to say in voiceover what exactly he was feeling at that moment and the best description he has is one of having a friend move away. (The other things he compares it to, like that of “a girl leaving you” or a break-up, will no doubt be something that Rich’s friends will rib him about unmercifully.) The others see that Rich and Dave were close as well. As Rich puts it, they share the same laughs, smoked continuously together, and drank coffee together – but mainly they kept each other sane in the situation they were in.

Still, when they reach the house, Rich tries to lighten the mood and tells the others that he is now the “man of the house” since Dave is gone. He will catch the rats and fix things now for them all. He just hopes that nothing breaks until they leave.

Ralphie looks back at the competition between Dave and Dat with renewed respect for Dat. “Dave was the better comic,” Ralphie says, but he felt that Dat really did beat Dave in front of that audience that night.

The next day, Dat (or, “the human dartboard” as Cory calls him) is out on the patio, during some martial-art kicks at a chair. Rich can’t believe it. “He’s fighting a chair,” Vos exclaims. Vos thinks it would be funny if the chair suddenly did a sidekick and threw Dat over the balcony wall. Then again, Vos admits that every thought he has about Dat involves Dat being thrown over the balcony wall. To illustrate this point, as Rich describes his fantasy of Dat stumbling around the house and then sailing over the wall, Dat is shown in the background stumbling over the chair and sailing out of camera-range. It is an once-in-a-lifetime illustration of Rich’s joke, but it almost slightly kills the joke at the same time.

Rich then goes on to ask what would happen if Dat was invited to eat dinner in a house that had one of the chairs. “Not in that chair. That chair killed my brother!”

Turning away from the weekly pokes at Dat, Cory is seen in the bedroom getting ready for her appearance on Last Call with Carson Daly. This was the prize she won for winning the exemption challenge the previous week. She arrives to find that her namebadge and the sign on her dressing room door both have her first name misspelled with an “e.” Easy mistake – “Corey” is a very common way of spelling it. At least that’s my excuse of misspelling it in one of the early articles here. Cory later sneaks out of her dressing room and scribbles out the “e” on the door’s sign.

Cory shows off the many decorated gift bags that are in the dressing room. She decides to take one back with the show’s title on it to show off to Dat and make him jealous. After a time, she is brought out to the set to see where to stand and when to come out. She is asked if she wants Jay off to the side, but she tells the crew that she is worried he might try to do something, or – if nothing else – would just make her nervous having him there so close by. The crew mugs for the camera and indifferently treats her as if she’s just another prop to move around.