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Celebrities, 6 February 2008

Memo to Dane Cook: YOU ARE DUMB.

"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.

The agony continues. For those of you who missed yesterday's column, I've taken Dane Cook's offhand blog comment as a challenge, and sat through the entirety of "Vicious Circle" from its premiere a week or so back on Comedy Central. At this point in the viewing, we're less than halfway through, and I'm already starting to crack under the strain:

• We all know you're gonna see your dad's dick. You've been telegraphing your dad's dick for five minutes. We are now desperately waiting for you to get to your dad's dick so that we can get past your dad's dick, even if you seemingly can't. There's such a thing as too much setup, and you flew past it four minutes ago and STILL HAVEN'T LOOKED BACK. Also, I don't know whether to thank you or chastise you for leaving all the creepy paedophilic implications of this last bit unexplored.

• Oh god, he's interacting with a front-row fan. I can't even make fun of this segment, because I don't get Comedy Central in HD, and am unable to accurately determine whether the fan is just a drunken moron in a Red Sox outfit, or is actually a developmentally disabled person who got front-row tickets as part of some charity event. The guy asks Dane to "play 'What's In My Mouth'", which I am PRAYING is a classic Cook comedy bit. And now the guy is walking up the aisle, which makes no sense, and Cook chases after him and hugs him, and it's time for my second vomit break so far.

• He's got a 'woman' voice! Of course he's got a 'woman' voice. All mediocre comedians have a 'woman' voice, and Dane's is... slightly higher-pitched and lispy. I will admit, though. Women are different than men. He's nailed that shit.

• HALFWAY POINT WORD COUNT: Ergo - 0. Ninja - 1. Dude - 4.3 million. Some of those may have been subliminally implied.

• It turns out that if you say the same words, over and over, changing the inflection on them maybe every third or fourth time? You get to make movies with Jennifer Aniston. Yeah, I'm not gonna try it either. But it apparently works.

• Ah. Ironic dark punchline to sappy story inbound. We all know it's coming. Happy old married couple. What's the secret? What's the twist punchline secret that makes it funny? "Cheat". From the husband. Come the fuck on. Even the cheap solar-calculator comedy math that Cook does tells us it's funnier if the wife says it. It's like "cocksucker". Only a little funny in general, but out of the mouth of Betty White? Hilarious. So change it! We all know it's not a real couple. They didn't give you a real camera to take a real picture and give you a real anecdote with a shitty punchline. You made up that shitty punchline, and didn't even do the minimum legwork required to elevate it. And there's ANOTHER THIRD OF THIS TO GET THROUGH.

• Hey, there's the titular title. You know, right before this originally came out, all the ads showed him saying "It's a vicious circle" without actually saying what the vicious circle was. Turns out it's cheating.
  
  You know, there's a whole weird conservative vibe to Dane Cook's comedy. He's like the mirror image of a sermon at a megachurch, where it's about Jesus and family values, but there's colored lights and a sound system and a big-screen TV. And on the other side of the mirror is Dane Cook, who says "vagina" and "fuck", but also that atheists are assholes and you shouldn't ever cheat on your girlfriend. It's kind of creepy.

• It'd be intellectually dishonest to fast-forward through the rest of this cheating bit, wouldn't it? Fuck it, I DON'T CARE.

• Hey, guess what? He couldn't get through 30 seconds about talking back to the movie screen without mentioning black people! What were the odds? I suppose he tried to mix it up by making it so that he was the one talking so much black people were shushing him, but at this point, I am not feeling at all merciful.

• No, seriously, how the fuck does this actually work? Universally appealing observational humor about shit NOBODY DOES AND NEVER HAPPENS? And not in an ironic, mocking-the-form kind of way, either. There's like some weird pact he has with the audience where he says stuff, and they pretend to identify with it. It's a corruption of the "it's funny because it's true" contract, and every last one of these cheering bastards is in on it.

• GODDAMMIT FINISH THE MOVIE BIT ALREADY, YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER, BEFORE MY SOUL DIES SCREAMING! (this is a complete and accurate transcription of my note about 7 minutes before the end of the special, by the way.)

• By the way, that bit from before? Where he talked about how much he likes talking back to the screen? It never pays off. We never find out what kinds of things he yells at the screen. You'd think there'd be an anecdote, a long fucking anecdote full of hand-waving, that the earlier bit was setting up, but no. Which would be a blessing, except that the space it would have occupied was instead taken up by making fun of movie trailers.

• This is what I mean by shit not actually happening. I'm half-blind and barely coordinated. And I can get my cup into the cupholder in the dark EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME. It's like those infomercials for a hose reel where you have to exaggerate the difficulty of rolling up a hose, so you show an old woman tangled in garden hose and screaming for help.

• The credits are rolling, I still don't know what that fucking hand symbol is for. Wait! There's a card for "Superfinger Productions". With the Inverted Spidey. Great. Thanks to the last 90 minutes, I was just able to construct, in my mind, an entire Dane Cook bit about the Superfinger that I'm sure appears in one of his earlier CDs. Kill me now.

I have to say. I have never, in my life, erased anything from my DVR with more relief and vigor than I did with Dane Cook: Vicious Circle. I hope, in some small way, I've lived up to Dane Cook's vision, and over the last three days, simultaneously convinced you that Dane Cook isn't funny, and created something that nothing is funnier than. But at what cost? I'm actually looking FORWARD to writing about the election again, and that ain't right.