Day: March 18, 2011

It's only been six months since the great stand-up comedian Greg Giraldo died from an accidental overdose. Giraldo's impact within the comedy community was so profound that Comedy Central had no trouble assembling an all-star group to talk about him for Give It Up For Greg Giraldo, which has two airings late tonight. Here is a clip from the opening minute of the special, featuring praise for Giraldo from Conan O'Brien, Dave Attell, Bob Saget, Nick Swardson and Tom Papa. Jon Stewart also talks early and often about how Giraldo set the bar high for everyone else. Too soon? In a sense, yes. The heartbreaking loss is still so raw for many of us. Swardson starts to break down while talking about how Giraldo is suddenly gone. And when Giraldo's participation in NBC's Last Comic Standing last year is mentioned, we hear about him through Mike DeStefano, whom we also just lost two weekends ago. And earlier this week, at the Comedy Central Roast of Donald Trump, Jeffrey Ross and Seth MacFarlane both took time to mention the loss of Giraldo. When Giraldo died, the mainstream media unfairly portrayed him as just an "insult comic" or roaster, when that was merely a thing that he was asked to do that he happened to be brilliant at executing.   Because Greg Giraldo was brilliant, period. A graduate of Columbia University...

The Futon Critic is claiming an exclusive overnight that NBC would not be airing a season of Last Comic Standing in the summer of 2011, citing a network spokesperson. Except you didn't need anyone from NBC to tell you that. All you had to do was notice that they hadn't held a single audition yet for LCS this year. They had announced the return of Last Comic Standing for season seven in 2010 in January of that year. Last year's auditions for season seven of LCS took place in early March. And there's nothing on the NBC casting site for the show. So, yeah. If it's the middle of March and they haven't done a single bit of production on the series for the summer, you can probably get an NBC spokesperson to confirm that the series is back on hiatus. LCS previously had taken years off between seasons 3 and 4, and between seasons 6 and 7. Season 7 averaged just shy of 4 million viewers on average, produced as always by Peter Engel...