As Drew Carey never failed to remind people, improvised classic TV comedy Whose Line Is It Anyway was the show where the points didn’t matter. (No matter how loudly Chris Hardwick might yell about them many years down the line.) Even so, Carey dutifully handed them out over the years, slowly filling the virtual wallets of Colin Mochrie, Ryan Stiles, Wayne Brady, and the rest of the show’s rotating cast of comics with an untraceable, largely valueless currency of dubious origin. (And, in writing that sentence, we suddenly realized that Drew Carey invented cryptocurrency back in 1998.) (Don’t at us, Clive Anderson fans.)
Introduce a number on the internet, though, and it won’t be long until someone is there to loyally track it to a terrifyingly obsessive degree. Like, say, the minds behind Whose Line-focused YouTube channel 12Medbe Network, who’ve compiled what appears to be every single time Carey handed out points during the show’s original U.S. run on ABC, and then—in strict opposition to the host’s frequently stated wishes—tabulated them all to come up with a grand champion for the entire series
Shockingly enough, the ultimate winner wasn’t Colin, Ryan, Wayne, or even that old stand-by, “the audience.” Instead, it was comic Chip Esten, who appeared on a mere 39 episodes of the old series, but who managed to just barely squeak out a win by dint of a “thousand points to the tenth power award” Carey handed him in during the show’s eighth season. It would be a pretty amazing comeback, if the points mattered, which, we feel obligated to inform you, they did not.