'Idol Gives Back' Replaced With 'Idol Taunts Starving Africans with $6000 Food Fight'

Last night's elimination episode of American Idol bore witness to a somber Rat Pack funeral, as brave rodent warrior Matt Giraud was set adrift in a flaming shoebox towards the storied State Fair Valhalla awaiting all his fallen Idol brethren. It was sad, but not surprising: Giraud has cheated death more than once this season, having both benefited from a Wild Card pick, and, even more amazingly, from the Judge's Save -- a rare and wonderful 1UP mushroom that instantly replenishes your Super Karaoke Bros.' dwindling energy stores.

The big surprise would be the second-to-last finisher. Yes, the once-thought-invincible Adam Lambert -- the singing equivalent of a tiger-wrangling Vegas illusionist, whose upper register has the uncanny ability to conjure spontaneous cat orgies in my living room -- found himself just a few keypad-punches away from an untimely demise. In any case, Lambert was spared, and his armies of followers have now been stirred out of complacency and back into number-dialing action. As Swine Flu Patient Zero Megan Joy Corkrey knows all too well, no one in the karaokedome is immune.

Because any elimination episode is essentially six seconds of interesting material spread over the course of an hour, we're often subjected to the equivalent of what's known in the sausage-making industry as "partially hydrolyzed soy protein concentrate." In this case, that would be a short documentary about a birthday cake food fight, which is not nearly as titillating as it sounds when the frosting-smeared combatants aren't bikini-clad Jäeger girls but but rather LensCrafter-shilling God warriors. It all ends with a delicious coda, however, as the instigator is presented with a $6000 cleaning bill.

For contrast, we've included video from Idol Gives Back, the fundraising gala the show chose not to mount this year, in which Ryan Seacrest and Simon Cowell tour a famine-ravaged African township to Coldplay's "Trouble." Thankfully, no bills are presented, though Seacrest does chew out one villager over that region's limited accessibility to premium hair product.

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