Half of Last Comic Standing’s Top Ten Announced, Fifteen Sent Home

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Last night Last Comic Standing aired the first of two Semi Finals rounds.  Forty one comedians moved forward from the invitational rounds and roughly half of them were evaluated last night. We didn’t get to see all twenty comics, Last Comic Standing only aired material from about 14 of them.  Of the fourteen whose material aired, the judges comments were pretty positive across the board, except for Harrison Greenbaum who got spanked again by Norm Macdonald for not doing research. If you remember last week, Greenbaum took some shit from Norm for making a religious joke and was reprimanded for not doing his research about Harry Potter author J.K. Rowlings.  This week Norm read Greenbaum the riot act again for not doing his research, this time about the origins of the acronym NAACP.

Greenbaum wasn’t the only comic who took got tough criticism in the round. There were some short cuts showing the worst beatings taken during the first half of the semifinals, but we didn’t get to see the performances that elicited the rough stuff. Here’s what the judges had say about the seven comedians we didn’t get to see.

“You were all over the place tonight thematically i couldn’t ever wrap my head around what the narrative of the set was.” — Keenan; “If you watch the documentary on scientology maybe you could have made your jokes clearer,” — Norm;  “It’s now time to stop being a pharmacist and get out in the world” — Keenan; “I just didn’t think it was really very strong,” – Roseanne; “The first time I liked Christian and this time I gotta get an urban dictionary, it was not as good a set.” – Norm; “Everybody seemed to suffer from trying to top themselves. Tongiht I just didn’t feel like it lived up to the expectation.” – Keenan; “I didn’t hear anything that I haven’t heard before.” -Roseane

When the dust settled, five of the twenty comics were chosen to move on. Clayton English who had what Norm called “The set to beat,” Taylor Thompson who amazed the judges with her material and had a last joke that Norm called  an atom bomb; Andy Erickson who drew some comparisons to Emo Phillips for her character and delivery, Norm compared Andy Erickson to Emo Phillips;  Sheng Wang whose set caused a little scuffle between Norm and Roseanne over how many classic jokes he created; and Franciso Ramos, who all the judges agreed was a monster comic even though Norm said the set was almost material free.

The big disappointment of the night was that Ms. Pat didn’t move forward into the top 10. Her material was phenomenal and she’s undoubtably one of the funniest and most original comedians in the competition.  From the way the show was edited and Keenan’s commentary it looks like not listening to Wanda’s suggestion to tighten that first joke could have cost her. But we would have put her in our top five of the night easily.  Mehran Kaghani, Alycia Cooper, Brad Loekle, Sammy Obeid, Kevin Bozeman, Brian Kelly, and DC Ervin also got some good feedback but didn’t make it to the finals.

Next week, the remained 21 semi finalists will perform for a chance to grab the remaining five finalist positions.  Tune in at 10:00pm on Wednesday to see who else is going to the final rounds.

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