I've grown to like the show (the comics are often VERY funny) but as games go, it's pretty forgettable. Forget the meters; they'd do just as well by having one comic come out and tell three jokes, one four and one five. You get a billion bucks for every joke your comic tells. That's what they're doing now, only hiding it with the laugh meter, I BELIEVE (installed to forestall lawsuits).
Here's a different idea for an end game - have the comics, one at a time, read a funny line from a famous movie. You lose $5 billion for every new line that has to be read before you guess the movie; if you lose all your money, no trip for you. (And if the producers get really cheap, they could make the movie a Charlie Chaplin or maybe a Harold Lloyd flick.