Would they both please sit down?

So tonight Jon Reep and Lavell Crawford battled it out for the Last Comic Standing title. And no matter who wins, it is the wrong person. John Reep has been one of the worst in the finals and should have been sent home a long time ago. Lavell Crawford was impressive in the initial round and the first round of the finals, but since then has been unintelligible and unfunny.

Gerry Dee was by far the best comedian the past three weeks and yet he got voted out. He deserved to win which could be why he was so broken up when he didn't advance. I guess the way to win is to play to the least common denominator, the way the two finalists do.

Neither of the two finalists improved their lots tonight with their time tonight though. They must have gotten together before hand and agreed to not have any punchlines in their set as they both try to out setup each other.

Jon Reep did his whole set on his dad snoring in a storytelling style but has neither the charisma nor the punchlines to pull it off. The set started off with, "So who knows someone who snores really loud?" and I started shaking my head seeing exactly where it was going. Jon Reep's dad snores loudly, he often falls asleep on the couch watching TV and snores intermittently and in amusing ways, he once snored loudly in church and pretended it wasn't him. If you found that last sentence funny then you might have really enjoyed the set.

Lavell counters with another bit about being at the fast food restaurant and bad customer service.. You see Lavell is fat so when the fast food employee asks him if the gigantic 25-piece chicken meal he just ordered is eat in or to go it's supposed to be funny. This is of course ignoring the fact that the employee is just working off a script and would ask me that question if I ordered it (which at least would have the surreal juxtaposition of the enormous meal against my rather low BMI frame). The customer service bit was that the people on line don't speak English that well (but given the accent that Lavell uses to imitate the worker, we must be calling different lines. I usually get a "British" person whereas he gets someone from Nigeria). But at least Lavell thinks he is funny as he was laughing very hard at his jokes throughout.

I think (or at least hope) part of the problem is the horrible way NBC setup the show. They have given the comics the same 5 minutes to perform the whole finals round and tonight was no different. I fail to see why they didn't give the comedians 10 or 15 minutes to show off. That might sounds counterintuitive since I just talked about how I didn't like the sets and yet I am asking for more. I do for two reasons. One is that I am sure that the comedians are used to doing sets that run longer than 5 minutes and as such are out of their comfort zone (they can't do jokes that run too long or are setup by other jokes because they don't have the time). Secondly, the show is supposed to be the big final competition between these two, deserved or not, and so the show should focus on them. I want a larger sample size of their stand-up to decide who should win.

But instead of giving the time to the comedians that America has asked to see more of, NBC decided to pack the show with three outside pointless comedians: Kathleen Madigan was pretty funny (the best of the night bar-none) but Gilbert Gottfried (with a circa 1999 set heavy with Calista Flockhart jokes) and Greg Proops (bad Obama-Clinton political commentary) were awful. What was the point of their performances? Filler. Maybe NBC didn't have confidence in the finalists either.

I may not actually vote in the competition (that way I can still feel superior-- yeah, I watch reality shows, but I don't actually vote... that's just sad) but I reserve the right to complain about it... It is my right as a belligerent fuck.