I recently annoyed a good friend of mine because I chose to do a paid college gig rather than do the open audition for Last Comic Standing. For some reason my friends have often thought me a great choice for a reality show (probably no greater insult)and a comedy reality show seemed like a match made in Attention-Grabbing Heaven. However, before I made my choice between college gig and LCS I saw something very interesting.

On a comic’s website in late February he had listed as one of his upcoming gigs the LCS audition on March 8th at Carolines. That’s great, but then I realized that the open audition (the one they tape to show how popular and compeititive the competition is) was on March 7th. Suddenly I felt like Kevin Costner in JFK when Donald Sutheland tells him that the papers in New Zealand were reporting Kennedy’s death 12 hours before it actually happened. What could this mean – could this mean that reality shows are fixed?

Quiz Show + DaVinci Code + no one caring = this secret that I have uncovered.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like LCS – without it I may have never seen Gary Gulman, who is an awesone comic – check out my links and buy his cd, which is tremendous. And based on the imitations of auditions, 2-3 minutes of material for openers – you need additional screening to make sure you don’t get some a-hole who just lifted 2 minutes of great material from someone else. But that said – they should not make the show out to be some unknown needle in a haystack search. They should just pick out there industry 40-50 comics and let them compete. At least that would be honest. But instead NBC likes to feed into our outdated Horatio Alger mindset that “Even I could make it.” The game is fixed Horatio and the best you can do is stand in line to make the guy they already picked before hand look like he beat you out fair and square.

So when I took this all in I decided to take the college gig for a few reasons:

1) Paid Money

2) It’s at my Alma Mater

3) The college kids only care if my stuff is funny and not marketable.

4) Since Williams College is the top ranked liberal arts school in the country I am hoping one kid who watches my show goes to Harvard Law, becomes a super agent and books me a spot for Last Comic Standing.