"Last Comic Standing"
Thursday, 9:30 p.m.
WTHR (Channel 13)

Despite the shocking lack of laughs it offers on a weekly basis, “Last Comic Standing” remains one of TV’s most entertaining reality competitions by being the anti-“American Idol.”

The comics, most of them either amateurs or struggling newcomers, don’t get to perform professional material, like “Idol” contestants do. They must get on stage with their own jokes and try to impress. In the process, they consistently prove that nothing in show business is tougher than standup comedy.

You probably know a lot of people who are funny — either cutting, self-deprecating, quick-witted, whatever. But how many of them could get in front of an audience for even one minute and get laughs with jokes they wrote themselves?

It’s ridiculously hard, as “Last Comic Standing” is now about to demonstrate for a sixth season.

As always, the season begins with auditions, and host Bill Bellamy promises (threatens?) that they’ll be looking at comics from 20 countries and six continents. After watching tonight’s season premiere, I can tell you they still have yet to find their first funny person.

Their search begins in New York and Tempe, Ariz., where a slew of awful — I mean wretched — comics audition. The judges (Steve Schirripa and Richard Belzer in New York; Fred Willard and Kathy Najimy in Tempe) are way too generous in letting comics through.  

Take Esther Ku, a 24-year-old girl of Korean descent. She tells a “joke” about how a friend complained that women make 77 cents for every dollar men earn. Her punch line: “We really have no right to complain because we make them spend 50 cents for every dollar they make anyway, right?”

That’s funny?

Then she makes another “joke” about how she stays skinny by eating with chopsticks. “We can’t pick much up with those things, either.”

Yikes. “I like her delivery,” Belzer says. “It’s conversational and funny.”

Well, when he was a comic, Belzer’s big joke would be to run his hand through his hair, pretend it got caught and then fall down. So maybe he genuinely finds Ku funny. Or more likely, she’s just less bad than the others he had to sit through.

Belzer and Schirripa also praise a “Christian acoustic folk duo” called God’s Pottery that smiles a lot and sings unfunny put-on songs about premarital abstinence (“Let’s not jump into bed yet / for the pants come off / when the ring goes on”) and Stone and Stone, twin brothers who talk over each other. They don’t say anything funny — their idea of a joke is to say that one of them is dating a woman named “Mahor” — but I guess the act is considered novel enough.

The pickings are no better in Tempe, where one of the contestants actually does impersonations of comics Gilbert Gottfried and Bobcat Goldthwaite. How, um, ’80s of him.

If you’ve watched any of “Last Comic Standing”’s first five seasons, you know the show has a terrible track record. The first five winners — Dat Phan, John Heffron, Alonzo Bodden, Josh Blue and Jon Reep — can’t claim nearly the success that, say, “Idol” winners such as Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood have had. Nor are they as good at comedy as “Idol”’s best are at singing. But clearly, it’s easier to sing than it is to be a comedian.