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.
A day after Stephen Colbert signed off from The Late Show – the comedy institution abruptly euthanized to grease the skids for a plutocrat-coded media merger even as it dominated the ratings – Allen inherited the slot with Comics Unleashed, which feels less like a late-night show than an infomercial for one. Viewers conditioned to expect sharp monologues, celebrity interviews and some kind of live-wire unpredictability at bedtime should try Kimmel instead – or, better yet, wait for John Oliver. Comics Unleashed is not a show you tweet about in the moment, discuss the next morning or DVR with anticipation. It exists one evolutionary rung above a looped fireplace video, the sort of thing Walmart might run silently on a showroom TV wall.
Anyone who has stayed up late since David Letterman was hurling watermelons off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater already knew what was coming. Comics Unleashed has long been the creature of syndication that jolts you awake with an assault on the senses after Paul Shaffer or Craig Ferguson had gently rocked you into a stupor, breaking in between ads for car dealerships and ambulance chasers. For the better part of this century, Comics Unleashed has remained, to varying degrees, a stubborn late-night fixture because Allen – a hack comic who parlayed repackaged media assets into a billion-dollar fortune – has been willing to compete with the makers of the ThighMaster and the George Foreman Grill for bargain-bin network airtime.
Under the CBS arrangement, Allen keeps most of the advertising revenue while effectively renting the slot from the network. In interviews ahead of Unleashed’s 11.35 pm debut, Allen made a point of boasting that CBS executives had offered virtually no creative notes. That tracks. The show is essentially unchanged from when it debuted in 2006. “There’s nothing like it on it TV right now where you have five comedians sitting around with one purpose: making people laugh,” Allen told the Guardian last week. It quickly becomes clear why.
Save for the screen saver vibes coming from a fish tank behind Allen, watching the show’s first week on CBS was not nostalgic in any comforting sense. It felt more like stumbling across an old ice machine in a dark hotel hallway, still running somehow despite the fatal-sounding clatters and groans. There’s an unmistakable superficiality to Comics Unleashed. The generic prefab set is lit like a furniture showroom. The canned video filling the B-roll intros looks scraped from Shutterstock, and the framed photos of Jon Lovitz and Sinbad feel ripped from a Comedy Cellar wall.
A DJ perches among the audience, radiating the kind of forced enthusiasm only Hollywood gig work can buy. Allen is introduced as the “ambassador of funny”. You just know that before the cameras rolled, some poor warm-up act had to ask this tourist audience: “Who’s ready to laugh?”
To kick off one episode, Allen sports a bright red shacket over gray slacks and a jumper – a notable escalation in his usual off-the-rack business-casual motif. All week, war in Iran, a papal broadside against AI and a New York Knicks playoff run dominate the news cycle, but Allen touches none of it, mindful of dating the show –or, worse, roiling his paymasters. He doesn’t even attempt a tone-setting monologue. Instead, he flashes heart hands at the camera before the show smash-cuts to the waiting-room set-up, where he’s already seated among the guests, chirping in a singsong voice: “We have some funny people here!”
Years ago on his Netflix show, the late, great Norm Macdonald distilled the essential lie of Comics Unleashed: “Oh, you couldn’t be more leashed,” he deadpanned. The show takes the loose, conversational group-chat format of programs like The Graham Norton Show and Politically Incorrect and drains every last trace of spontaneity until only a shriveled husk of human interaction remains.
Allen does not really interview his guests so much as gently cue them to deliver the chunk of standup material everyone previously agreed would play best in syndication. A typical exchange begins with Allen offering something like, “I heard you just got engaged,” before the comic launches into a tightly packaged minute of relationship material. It is chatbot conversation performed by humans, only less human now.
Allen has long prided himself on making Unleashed a showcase for diverse comics and perspectives, even as the show itself flattens them into broad, market-tested archetypes: the Puerto Rican comic riffing on his irresponsibly large, broke family. The Irish-Mexican standup turning alcoholism into the connective tissue between his dual ethnicities. The female comic “workshopping” contempt for her husband. The Black comic reduced to a parody of a Showtime at the Apollo set. Most times, they don’t even get to the punchline before the canned applause roars in.
Whichever guest isn’t speaking just sits there feigning surprise, as if they haven’t heard these jokes a hundred times already in the comedy-club trenches they all share. Occasionally, Allen himself tries spicing up the conversation. But without the luxury of a quick wit or a reliable stock of funny stories, he comes off like a man straining to fill the airtime CBS is charging so handsomely for.
When the Black comic’s riff on “Things Black people shouldn’t do” falls predictably flat, Allen jumps in with an anecdote about telling his kids that the real aliens are underwater, not outer space. At the end of the story, the kids shouted for their mother, and the canned applause rushed over the guests’ put-on smiles and into the void where a punchline would normally be, reminding viewers once again that yes, this was indeed a funny moment. Don’t believe your lying eyes.
The only thing Comics Unleashed has going for it is that it’s scarcely 20 minutes long without the all-important commercials. “That was a lot of fun, huh?” Allen says to close each interchangeable episode – raw material soon to be recycled into slop for BuzzFeed, his latest media acquisition. As the credits roll on the red-shacket episode, he gathers the guests for a group photo. The lady comic peels away almost immediately to check her phone. It’s a reminder of how easily the whole thing could be replaced by whatever’s already waiting in the feed, much of it genuinely funny – and how quickly everyone in the studio will forget they were ever there.
Already, Comics Unleashed is delivering on its most predictable outcome. CBS’s ratings are down 87% since the show replaced Colbert. But the show, of course, isn’t on television to compete or even entertain. It’s there to drown the egos of powerful men in a tsunami of false affirmation. It’s compulsive normalcy as programming, brought to you by late-stage capitalism – a disturbingly powerful infomercial for these times.
