Last Comic Standing 6, Episode 5: Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Funny Masses…

The ratings were not kind to LCS last week, with the numbers dropping to 4.05 million total viewers, and the 18-49 demos hitting 1.7 with a 6 share. It did better for NBC than a repeat of My Name is Earl, but the new series after LCS, Fear Itself – which is considered a toss-off summer program that isn’t expected to perform well – did better for NBC than LCS, with 4.89 million viewers (although I suspect viewers coming off of Supernatural on the CW Network may have had something to do with the boost). Of course, the NBA Finals game on ABC had a lot to do with the ratings that night, but LCS is getting soundly beaten each week by So You Think You Can Dance on the Fox Network, and that may lead to some concerns at NBC.

The day my recap went up for Episode 4, featuring reviews of tryouts from Minneapolis and Nashville, I got an email from The Amazing Arthur. For those who didn’t see Episode 4, The Amazing Arthur was a juggler who was seen in the program trying out for Brian Baumgartner and Kate Flannery. Here’s what I wrote about him in the review:

The Amazing Arthur is next and he does a lot of excellent juggling and is amusing. Baumgartner seems to wear a number of emotions on his face during the act: He appears to like the skill involved with the juggling, but immediately also feels it is not right for the show and then anxious for the act to end so they can move on to others. Baumgartner tells Arthur that he’s great, but not right for the show.

Just read your article and I wanted to drop a line to say I never even saw the judges! My performance they showed was for the producer. Kate and Brian left right before I was to go on, and with about 15 other comics waiting to go up. They cut ALL of my jokes and put my routines up with some ultra lame circus music! ARGH! I want the record to be clear on this. The judges’ reactions were either taped later or from some other acts. I know there was a juggler up before me. Thanks for not ripping my act too badly.

That seemed odd enough, but there’s more. Four days later, the RNO offices got an email from Gretchen & Egbert. Again, for those who may have missed the article, Gretchen & Egbert were shown performing for George Wendt, and John Ratzenberger in Nashville. Here is what I wrote in last week’s review:

Shown, but not picked, was an act called Gretchen and Egbert, which involves two people dancing in weird poses and nothing else. It’s enough to make Wendt mumble that he wishes he wasn’t a judge so he wouldn’t have to endure such acts.

We were actually called by the NBC casting dept of Last Comic Standing and asked to do our crazy little act as a way to fill time. We never auditioned. We didn't stand in line. We filmed 45 minutes of material shook hands with the crew and off we went. Obviously, they did their famous "Splice and Dice" to make it look as stupid as they could. We figured they might.

Another little FYI is that George Wendt and John Ratzenberger weren't even in the room when we supposedly "auditioned." It was two women, and who knows who they were, but they couldn't stop laughing at our act. But I'm sure they cut that out too. We are NOT stand up comedians, we are sketch actors as in SNL, MAD TV, etc.

Yes, we feel better now...You made Gretchen cry (well okay I cried a little too), but you hurt our feelings and we want an apology or a cake or something.

Not that LCS is the first show to do this. In fact, American Idol is well known for having contestants try out in front of producers and then edit in reaction shots of the judges to make it appear that people auditioned in front of the “real” judges and not the producers. Still, there’s a difference when it comes to looking at a singer verses critiquing a stand-up comic (or comedy team, as in the case of Gretchen & Egbert). A bad singer is easy to spot – overacting, bad tone, etc.

But comedy can’t be viewed in the same manner. A snippet of a guy making a weird face or noise on-stage in his comedy act is hardly enough to say that is his entire act. For example, if I took Richard Pryor’s memorable bit about shooting his car and edited it down to him making the sound of one of the tires deflating (“AWWWWOOwwwwwooowww”) and showed simply that in a montage to a person who didn’t know Pryor, they probably would have thought he only did bad oddball sound effects in his act. If Steve Martin’s act was reduced to a shot of him putting on the arrow-through-the-head prop and the funny glasses, who would think that he had a fantastic premise behind it?

So, editing of the comics down to bits and pieces in order to show how bad they are has always bugged me. But what The Amazing Arthur and Gretchen & Ebgert went through is something more. Their acts were sabotaged for the TV audience by the deliberate mis-cutting of the judges’ reactions to make it appear that the judges did not like specific acts. More so, in the case of Gretchen & Egbert, the impression was that George Wendt hated the act. An act, according to the talents involved, that the man never saw. That’s not to say that Wendt was in on some type of staging here; he obviously was responding to a different act entirely. But to make his comment appear to be about an act he didn’t see is very regrettable. Maybe the producers didn’t care for Gretchen and Egbert, but were the judges’ comments and facial expressions borrowed from other parts of the tryouts really a clear indicator of how the people performed?

Furthermore, in the case of The Amazing Arthur, he wasn’t exaggerating about the editing – they did take out all of his gags. Thus, while he appeared to be a very good juggler, the editing gave the appearance that his act was not a funny one that could be useful for the program. Worse yet, the parting comment from The Amazing Arthur is shown being responded to by Kat Flannery and made to come off as if The Amazing Arthur was somewhat insulting to the judges when that clearly was not possible. So when you see Brian Baumgartner looking impatient and bored, you agree because you can only assume The Amazing Arthur’s act wasn’t appropriate for the show – given what was aired.