Felipe Esparza wins Last Comic Standing 7

Last Comic Standing 7 ended last night, and Felipe Esparza won the $250,000 prize and an NBC talent deal. Asked how he felt, he said in his typical dry style, “Good. Awesome.” Tommy Johnagin was the runner up, and the other runners up were, in order, Roy Wood, Jr., Mike DeStefano, and Myq Kaplan.

NBC’s resuscitation of Last Comic dispensed with everything except the live performance shows, which mostly worked except for the judges, who kept making it about themselves. On the finale, each judge performed a set, which was a risky but interesting thing to do. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t really find any of them to be outrageously funny, which may explain why they annoy me as judges. Or maybe I didn’t find them funny because they annoy me.

Craig Robinson, however, continued to excel as host, mocking the usual bloated reality competition finale throughout, saying “let’s make it more dramatic than ever” and also pointing out they were going to “milk this.” He also hilariously dragged out the final announcement, which made it tolerable. The filler was mostly NBC Universal synergy, from Marriage Ref Tom Papa to Bravo star Kathy Griffin.