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Celebrities, 4 February 2008

Memo to Dane Cook: YOU ARE DUMB. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"There is nothing funnier than someone that is not funny trying to convince other people that someone isn't funny." - Dane Cook, on his MySpace blog, 3/30/07.

Oh, it's on, frat-bitch. You may look at that line and see it as a head-back, defiant, devil-may-care riposte to your detractors, who are legion, but I see it for what it is: a challenge. Well, I also see it as a pathetic attempt at pseudo-reverse psychology, first seen on the Net forty seconds after Usenet was up and running, but that's beside the point. The important thing is that I see it as a challenge.

After all, I've hated Dane Cook for years purely based on cultural osmosis. I'm not saying I hated him because I was told to hate him by other people. What I'm saying is that the microscopic doses of Dane Cook I would get from time to time - a Good Luck Chuck trailer here, two seconds of Employee Of The Month flipped past there, or an ad for whatever current stand-up show he's hurled out there - was enough to firmly establish the hate. It's homeopathic hate, really. But it's time to take the Nestea Plunge. But sometimes, you take the Nestea Plunge and it doesn't go so great, and that's what I call The Nestea Plungeshit.

That last sentence, by the way, was what we call a "parody". And there are only two ways for you to have recognized that "parody". Either you're a Dane Cook fan, in which case you should probably go back and read the one about the guy who got fucked to death by a horse, or you have cable and watched the incessant promotion for the basic-cable premiere of Dane Cook's "Vicious Circle" show. Which I taped. And will now endure, in the hopes of turning my pain into your pleasure.

This'll be like liveblogging, except without the blogging part. And without the live part. For the record, this took about two hours, and resulted in eleven pages worth of handwritten notes. Think of it as my own personal "Heart Of Darkness", because I know I do. Time to head upriver.

• Goddammit, they're chanting his name. It's a huge venue, with lots of lights. Jesus wept, it's arena rock comedy. Which, like a vampire, keeps coming back no matter how much fucking garlic you've stuffed into Andrew "Dice" Clay's mouth.

• There's some kind of giant lit-up hand symbol motif going on - the middle and ring fingers sticking up. It's like an inverted Spider-Man. I don't know what it means, but I bet I'm going to find out. I'm twenty seconds in, and I'm already needing to siphon off my excess dread.

• He's hand-slapping his way through the crowd like he's Hogan at Wrestlemania. Or like he's Colbert after a complete ironyectomy.

• The first joke is key. That shit sets the tone for the rest of the night. What have I gotten myself into? I don't know yet. He's still soaking up the arena-rock adulation like an insecure sponge. Wait, he's got a microphone! He's raising his hand in the air.... fuck, it's the Inverted Spidey. The crowd's eating it up. Maybe he's metaphorically tickling their prostates.

• Oh, he wants to know what's up. Consider me unshocked.

• "There's so many things that I want to let you guys into my world about." First sentence of the evening, and I know I'm fucked. This is going to hurt. And you all get to suffer, second-hand, through my eyes. Enjoy your week!