Over the better part of the past decade, Amazon Studios has been rolling out a show with a simple premise: Gather ten comedians in a room and ask them not to laugh. The show launched first in Japan as Hitoshi Matsumoto Presents: Documental in 2016, and Amazon has since debuted the format — retitled LOL: Last One Laughing — in many other territories around the globe. So many, in fact, that it’s difficult to get an accurate count (Wikipedia lists 28, and I spotted at least 20 at first glance while searching on Prime Video here in the US). Each resulting series is highly specific to its region, from its contestants to its brand of humor (some more risqué, some family-friendly), which makes it popular in its home country while driving little traffic elsewhere. Unless you’re a Graham Norton completist, for example, you probably haven’t heard of LOL: Ireland, which he hosts.
The most recent iteration is LOL: UK, which premiered last week. I saw the trailer for it in my Instagram feed, which was the first I’d ever heard of the show. When I mentioned it on “Podjiba” this week, neither Dustin nor Dan was familiar with it either, and since Dustin is basically the Mayor of Television I figured it might be worth talking about.
[Dustin: The “Mayor of Television” is a Mr. Show bit, which you’d know if you’d ever seen it AHEM]
If my social media algorithm is any indication, Amazon may be testing the waters for a US version by promoting it stateside. The only thing that makes less sense than there not already being an American version is the fact that it took so long to launch the show in the UK. While the international proliferation of the format is reminiscent of competition shows like Survivor or The Traitors, the format itself is a natural fit for contestants who are already familiar faces on the endless variety of British panel shows. I mean, just guess who hosts LOL: UK…
Jimmy Carr. Who else would it be? Of course it’s Jimmy Carr!
I decided to give the UK show a look, mostly because Richard Ayoade is amongst the contestants and his inclusion, at least, does not disappoint. His entire brand of comedy is straight-faced annoyance, and the bit pays off in the very first episode as his fellow contestants literally walk away from him rather than engage him in a battle of endurance. The Big Brother-y set up finds the ten comedians locked in a room together for a set duration (six hours in this version). A lot of the time is spent mingling, and hidden cameras capture every grimace and smirk as they struggle not to giggle while simultaneously trying to trip each other up. But that would get stale, so along the way, Carr adds in mandatory activities to up the stakes. The most frequent bit is when Carr phones in from the control room and demands a contestant play their “Joker,” which is a planned performance each comedian has pre-prepared.
I’ve only seen the first two episodes, but so far the Jokers have been the most insightful parts of the show. Last One Laughing is all a bit inside-baseball, and how could it not be? It offers a glimpse at what comedians act like toward each other behind the scenes, with the added horror that they’re professionals who work for laughs in a room where, by design, no one is laughing. But with the Jokers we see what those comedians would do to make their peers laugh, and it turns out that comedy for comedians — at least in the UK — is high-concept absurdity. Joe Wilkinson, for example, stands at a podium and offers a serious lecture about the Royal National Lifeboat Institution that ends with a blast of pink paint splattering him unexpectedly. Bob Mortimer performs bad magic tricks while dancing and saying “Shhh… It’s Magic.” None of it, on paper, is the least bit funny, at least not the way you can write out a joke from a stand-up routine and still get a chuckle, and yet these are the moments that make the contestants absolutely writhe with suppressed laughter.
Apparently, when comedians perform for each other, they all fall back on Andy Kaufman-esque anti-comedy, and I think that’s fascinating! Now I’m wondering what a US version would be like, should it ever materialize. When we discussed this on “Podjiba,” we theorized that someone like Chris Gethard or Paul Scheer should host, which would guarantee at least that Jason Mantzoukas would be in the cast. And that would honestly be almost unfair, wouldn’t it? Who’s not going to laugh at Jason Mantzoukas?
