Joe Lowers looked at the Chinese cowboy, at the woman in the Elvira get-up, at the guy who was complaining that he was sore from riding his Harley and at the kid who looked so contextually unremarkable except for being so, you know, TV-ready.

Something was amiss.

This was at a comedy club in Los Angeles, in a preliminary stage of NBC's "Last Comic Standing" project.

"I asked the kid, 'How long you been doing comedy?' " Lowers told me on the phone the other day. "He said, 'Uh, this is my second time.' "

Lowers has been doing comedy for 10 years, coast-to-coast, good rooms and bad, hot crowds and, uh, not. He's outrageous. Hysterical. Works the crowd demonically in a kind of demon-next-door patois. Sometimes with props. In L.A., he'd just spent 11 hours (2 a.m. to 1 p.m.) in the line of comics outside for a shot at "Last Comic Standing" and was finally "on deck." The others -- the Asian cowpoke, the mistress of the night, queasy rider and the TV kid -- had all been pulled out of line and escorted inside the club without so much as cracking a one-liner.

Doubtless you see where this is headed.

In a week bringing news that nothing so trivial as a dog show was any longer above ethical suspicion -- a Doberman named Kerri was alleged to have been drugged by its competitors' handlers before its turn in the ring at a British competition -- the process for picking the 10 comics who'll appear in the second season of "Last Comic Standing" came under heavy fire.

"These people are under a tremendous amount of pressure from last year to come up with someone they can turn into a star," said Bill Scott, like Lowers a Pittsburgh-area comic with 10 years of club experience. "Last year they came up with [Vietnamese-American] Dat Phan, one of the worst comics we've seen."

Scott flew south for the Tampa club audition at the end of January, where rumors that the show had already been cast crackled like current up and down the line outside the club.

"I was in line from midnight until 10 a.m. with a lot of people who'd heard through the grapevine that the show had already been cast, and that we were all there to make it look like it was be run through a legitimate process. Finally someone from NBC came out and picked one guy out of the line, which I assume was just to appease all of us."

Scott wasn't exactly appeased. A polished and superior comic who deals heavily in deadpan irony, his suspicions that "Last Comic Standing" is anything but a competition metastasized this week when celebrity judges Drew Carey and Brett Butler, superstars of the club circuit who eventually earned their own network sitcoms, both scalded the network for what looks so increasingly like a cruel charade.

"I thought it was crooked and dishonest," Carey told the Hollywood Reporter after the Las Vegas semifinals last weekend. "It was like somebody at NBC cast the show ahead of the event in Vegas. And they had 1,100 people in the audience who saw how blatantly it was cast. If this happened on 'Survivor' or any other reality TV show, it would be a major scandal."

On her Web site, Butler wrote, "As panel judges, we can say that (a) we were both surprised and disappointed at the results and (b) we had NOTHING to do with them."

For its part, the network says the judging is only one of the criteria for a spot on "Last Comic Standing" and that the final decisions are made by the show's producers, advice that is available in the fine print of the credits from last year's show. Sure, everybody's familiar with that. It further shadows NBC's position that one of the show's producers, Barry Katz, according to the Reporter, is also the manager of two of the 10 finalists, Gary Gulman and a comic named Ant. The casting of Ant in particular riled Carey.

"I don't know how in the world Ant got picked out of these 20 [semifinalists]," Carey said. "The only thing I could think of was that he's gay and would add to the personality mix in the house."

In "Last Comic Standing," 10 comics live in a house with TV cameras while they compete against each other. That might be interesting. Just don't look for it to be very funny.