Last Comic Standing crowned its fourth season champion last night, with Josh Blue defeating fellow comedian Ty Barnett to win the fourth edition of the NBC reality talent competition show.
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As Last Comic Standing 4's winner, Blue will receive an exclusive NBC talent contract and his own comedy special on NBC Universal's Bravo cable network.
Blue, a 27-year-old who has cerebral palsy and currently resides in Denver, CO, and Barnett, a 33-year-old Chicago resident, had both performed on Tuesday night's Last Comic Standing 4 broadcast, after which home viewers voting via telephone and online determined which comedian would win the fourth season title.
In addition to one more (irrelevant for voting purposes) set of performances from Blue and Barnett, Wednesday night's special 90-minute Last Comic Standing 4 finale broadcast also featured standup performances from Season 1 winner Dat Phan, Season 2 winner John Heffron, Season 3 winner Alonzo Bodden, and actor/comedian Jay Mohr, who in addition to helping create the series, had also hosted Last Comic Standing's first three seasons.
Mohr had been an outspoken critic of NBC's handling of Last Comic Standing 3, the hastily-assembled and poorly-rated Fall 2004 edition that the network abruptly pulled from the air with only one episode remaining. Although Mohr still retained a consultant credit when NBC decided to resurrect Last Comic Standing for a fourth edition, he wasn't involved with the fourth season and fellow actor/comedian Anthony Clark replaced him as the show's on-air host. As recently as a few weeks ago, Mohr had told Zap2It.com that he had "no interest" in the fourth season. In a departure from the show's usual format, Mohr was introduced by Last Comic Standing executive producer Peter Engel instead of Clark.
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Last Comic Standing 4's finale broadcast also revealed that former MTV Road Rules castmember Theo Von (previously known as Theo Vonkurnatowski) had defeated Josh Wolf to win the show's separate online-only "Last Comic Downloaded" NBC.com competition. Von and Wolf had both performed on Tuesday's finale broadcast, after which home viewers could vote for their favorite online.
Last month, NBC announced that, happy with the ratings that this summer's Last Comic Standing revival has drawn, a fifth edition of the show will air part of NBC's Summer 2007 primetime programming.