The applause, dear God, the applause. It has you bracing against the headboard and groping for the remote when Comics Unleashed detonates on to the screen just before midnight. A soulless barrage of whoops, cheers and apparatchik-grade terror clapping, it hits like a jet engine at takeoff, swallowing the show’s disembodied announcer in a silo of his own manufactured zaniness.
The applause snuffs out introductions to the guests, all standup comics – a who’s who of who’s that – and upstages a modest studio audience that appears to have been rounded up from pamphlet-clutching LA tourists. It even leaves the host himself, 65-year-old Byron Allen, limply shuffling to reclaim the frame as the show’s cameras whip around him from every conceivable angle. In the reverse shots, you can already see the night’s guests parked in the makeshift waiting-room set up at stage left, apparently settled in for Allen’s monologue. But there is no monologue. Comics Unleashed has no writers, no comic sensibility, no discernible point of view – because CBS bent the knee to Donald Trump, and Allen makes Jimmy Fallon look like Eugene Debs.
