Bone In The Fan

Once again I find myself watching a show that I hate so much it makes me angry. I’ve known Last Comic Standing is an abomination since the first time I watched it a few years ago when I was suckered in and watched a few episodes thinking they might have, oh I don’t know, funny people on the show.  Instead I got to watch total hacks earn praise from the cross-promoting “judges” that sit on the panel.  Every year I tune in to check it out, hoping that maybe they’ll finally decide to look for actual comics.  But almost without exception, the only remotely funny people on the show get eliminated in favor of predictable, bland, repetitive, horribly unfunny formula performers. The people selected to go onto the finals, particularly tonight, are so devoid of talent that I can only imagine they were selected based on the producers’ desire to build a rainbow coalition of contestants that represent every permutation of race, gender, height, weight, nationality, sexual persuasion, shoe size, marriage status, tongue length, vocal timbre and ear-sticky-outy-ness. In fact, the only factor that they appear to have given absolutely no weight to during the entire process is talent, demonstrating that they have proudly reached that elusive goal of becoming talent-blind.

Bringing a whole new meaning to suck.

Now, even if I’m watching television alone, I’m the kind of guy who will do his best to not laugh should a random funny bit appear in a show that sucks as much as Last Comic Standing does because I just can’t shake the feeling that even smiling a little would simply encourage the show to keep sucking the life out of me (it would be like starting to laugh while I’m trying to explain why my son shouldn’t try to fart on his sister; for all the good my words are doing I might as well be sitting in a chair applauding.) I know in my heart though that it’s a sad and useless little rebellion.

But during tonight’s show, not laughing was easier than irritating my wife by leaving the toilet seat up in the middle of the night.  Which is to say, really fucking easy.  I felt like I was in some horrible, horrible coma where I could see and hear everything going on around me but couldn’t move a muscle, and every visitor in the hospital room was standing around and sucking the stupid out of their own heads and dropping it in my I.V. bag.  And I still didn’t turn the damn show off (though I did hit the fast-forward button quite a bit, including and most importantly any time I heard word one start to come out of host Bill Bellamy’s mouth; I’d never have thought to combine writing that bad with a voice that irritating, but then I’m not a big time TV producer so what do I know?)

Why? Why didn’t I turn it off? Because the only thing worse than being in one of those comas is being in one of those comas and waking up before I’ve gotten all the stupid I deserve.

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