On the surface, Bob Read and Ross Mark seem to have the kind of job that most kids would kill for. As talent executives for "The Tonight Show," they spend their time watching standup comics, giving their stamp of approval to only the best.

In Tuesday night's (June 8) two-hour premiere of the second season of NBC's "Last Comic Standing," viewers are treated to the dark side of Read and Mark's profession.

Imagine spending weeks on the road listening to bad stand-up comics. Then refine that mental image to include one horrible Arnold Schwarzenegger impression after another. In every pause, every fleeting second of silence, insert a stale Michael Jackson joke or a ventriloquist whose lips flap wildly.

"Comedy isn't pretty and a lot of the time it's not funny," Mark notes, articulating a truism that will be clear to anybody who sits through the early audition episodes of "Last Comic Standing." Most of the performers are unknowns, a fact that won't be mourned by the viewing public.

For its sophomore session, "Last Comic Standing" has dedicated extra time to the audition process, and Read and Mark are the stars of the first episode as they travel through eight cities from Los Angeles to Tampa Bay wading through puddles of schmaltz and shtick. While they got eight different visits from Buck Star, a persistent stoner from San Bernardino, they also found gifted gagmeisters in each city.

"It is a funny job," says Read, the smaller and more vocal of the pair. "How many people get a chance to go around the country and make somebody's day and make somebody's life? Our decisions will basically give somebody a career."

This year, Read and Mark had a larger talent pool to sort through. The popularity of the first season, which drew 8.3 million viewers per week last summer, brought huge crowds to the auditions. The show has also trimmed some of the restrictions that left more established comics out of the process last time.

"You get better talent," Mark says of the decision not to exclude late night talk show veterans. "You get comics who wanted to do it last year, but because they did 'The Tonight Show' or they did the Letterman show, they weren't able to. Why should those comics be excluded from the competition because they did those talk shows?"

The result is a mixture of familiar faces and newcomers. People like Sue Costello, who starred in her own FOX series for four weeks in 1998, and Jim Norton, a regular on Colin Quinn's Comedy Central show are in the more experienced camp. They're countered by neophytes like Vladimir Khlynin, a 17-year-old from San Francisco.

For Read and Mark, funny is funny, no matter how long you've been making people chortle.

"You're sitting there and you know when somebody walks in that they've got stage presence, they've got the attitude, and then they open their mouth and they say something that's really genius and it wakes you up and it surprises you," Read explains.