‘Last Comic Standing’ review: Harrison Greenbaum, Lavar Walker close invitationals

We are now officially through with the invitational round of “Last Comic Standing,” and it feels like there is a single word that we would use at the moment to describe how we feel: Bittersweet. It is so hard to say goodbye to this round, since we’ve been introduced to some really great comics. However, there are benefits. We never have to see montage comedians who we know have little chance of going through, and we can now move forward with confidence that there is some talent.

We’re going to come through as always with our take on the performers of the week, ranked from least favorite to the best of the night. Granted, there are a few Incompletes in here since we didn’t get enough of some to judge them fairly. (We’ve done this a few times already this season, so no real surprise here.)

Incompletes – Ricarlo Flanagan, Angelo Tsarouchas, Melanie Comarcho. Angelo had a pretty funny joke. That’s seriously all we remember from these three.

Amir K – Amir ranged between very funny and then mildly funny. The Starbucks joke just didn’t work, bur some of his material about being Iranian did. We do give him credit for making the whole “you look like a terrorist” bit work, since it would be so easy to knock him for doing something that has already been done to death.

Michael Palascak – A very solid comic. Did we see the callback to parking on the sidewalk coming a mile away? Sure, but he’s someone we’d pay to see at a club, even if we had a feeling for the most part as to what we were going to get before even going in.

Mia Jackson – The only critique we offer up here is that her matchmaker bit was her funniest and most memorable part of her act. Unfortunately, it was also at the start, so we began with that before veering off into a different direction.

Noah Gardenswartz – Even though he was montaged, we saw enough of him to know that his whole joke about the tattoo was so completely absurd that it was hysterically funny. Really creative thing to do on stage.

Clayton English – Apparently, he and Karlous Miller from last season go way back. We actually found Clayton much funnier than we did Karlos; maybe part of it was his material tonight, and maybe part of it was just never imagining anyone coming up with this particular use of applesauce to get out of being arrested for having a certain drug.

Lavar Walker – Really tremendous, and aided somewhat by the fact that we’re not sure that we’ve ever seen a comic / pharmacist talking about the very-true phenomenon that is old people trying to use the debit card machine to check out, acting almost every time like it is the very first time they’ve seen it. Lavar speaks the truth, and in hilarious fashion.

Harrison Greenbaum – If there ever was a time we disagreed immensely with Norm MacDonald, it was here. Harrison CRUSHED it, and maybe drew the biggest reaction from the crowd of the entire invitationals in between the “Harry Potter” – Bible jokes and also the fat humor. Harrison’s clearly got some of that Friar’s Club DNA, and we appreciate the boldness here in a culture that has made it very hard to go for shock value as a comic. We still don’t understand why Norm is so upset, other than that apparently he expects every comic to understand the religious ties between JK Rowling’s work and the Bible.

Who was your favorite in this episode? Share in the comments.