The final two episodes of the first season of Prime Video’s “LOL: Last One Laughing” drop on Friday, March 4, with the finale revealing which of the 10 Canadian comedy icons will be declared the winner of the competition which the comedians pull out all the stops to eliminate each other with laughter.
In the previous episodes, viewers watched Caroline Rhea (“Sabrina the Teenage Witch”), Mae Martin (“Feel Good”), Debra DiGiovanni (“Humour Resources”), Dave Foley (“The Kids in the Hall”), K. Trevor Wilson (“Letterkenny”) and Jonathan Lajoie (“The League”) go down.
That left Tom Green (“Road Trip”, “The Tom Green Show”), Colin Mochrie (“Whose Line Is It Anyway?”), Andrew Phung (“Kim’s Convenience”) and Brandon Ash-Mohammed (“This Hour Has 22 Minutes”) as the last four standing.
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Speaking with ET Canada, Phung shared the strategy that kept him in the game until the finale week.
As he explained, being a fan of reality TV shows such as “Big Brother” and “Survivor” left him with something of a template to follow. “Like, I love those reality TV shows where you get to like, fight it out,” he said.
“As you spend more time with these people in the house, you become friends with them and gather information,” he said. “For me, it was like really trying to be very thoughtful in the conversations I was entering and the spaces I was getting in.”
Looking back on his game, Phung admitted that “there were times where I might have, I wish, jumped in the water more. Tom [Green] and Colin [Mochrie] were fearless at it. Like they went in like they didn’t care.”
Meanwhile, Ash-Mohammed reflected on one particular moment in the game when he miraculously managed to hold it together as several of his fellow funny folks targeted him simultaneously.
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“I just remember being like, ‘Oh damn, the sharks are circling. I don’t know if I’m going to get out of this,'” he recalled.
“But you know what? I held my ground. I held my ground and they could not break me. Unbreakable Ash-Mohammed is what they called me,” he continued.
As Ash-Mohammed pointed out, trying to outthink fellow comedians in order to get them to crack up is more difficult than it may seem at first blush. “Everyone was bringing out all stops, everyone was trying different things because it’s like, you’re not really sure how to get other comedians, because comedians know what’s going on behind the curtain. So it’s just like, how do you get them? How do you get somebody that can think the same way that you do? That is the hardest thing,” he added.
For improv veteran Mochrie, his decades on “Whose Line” provided him with the skills to take down his competitors — by being as silly as possible.
“I mean, all I knew was this is not the time to have any shame,” Mochrie explained of his strategy. “You know, I was hoping I get them with some Noel Coward-esque wit or something like that, but no, dressing up like a giant squirrel and just almost having a heart attack seemed to be the way to go.”
However, Mochrie also knew he’d have his work cut out for him when it came to fellow comedy veterans Tom Green and Dave Foley.
“You know, I was worried about everyone because, I mean, the old guys, you know, Dave and Tom, they’ve been around for a while. A little jaded. They’ve seen everything, so that makes it tough,” Mochrie explained.
READ MORE: Canada’s Comedy Elite Crack Each Other Up In Wild New Reality Show ‘LOL: Last One Laughing Canada’
As viewers will have seen, Mochrie made a special effort to take down Lajoie, and he explained his tactics. “Well, I saw some weakness there,” he said of Lajoie.
“And he had made the mistake of telling me he grew up with me, so he was a fan,” Mochrie added. “So yeah, unfortunately, I’m going to use that to your disadvantage.”
Fans can find out the identity of the winner in the season finale of “LOL: Last One Laughing Canada”, streaming now.
