Into My World About

Celebrities, 5 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. My impressions continue:

• I'll say this for him. Dane Cook is confident of his material. He's selling these jokes like they're a '68 Camaro owned by a little old woman who only drove it to church on Sundays. I'll admit, that's easier to do when you've got an arena full of screaming, chanting fans. People who didn't even fucking blink at the Ticketmaster surcharge are probably going to be... receptive. But still. He's putting it all out there.

• The first bit is about casual social lying. People are laughing, and I don't know why. Sure, meeting up with an old friend who's way more enthusiastic about seeing you than vice versa? Comedy staple. But why did they laugh and cheer when he said the guy called him "D.C."? Maybe it's a reference to something from an earlier show. Or maybe it just sounds like "peepee".

• First actual for-real joke! Bees don't fly straight, ergo "beeline" is a misnomer. That's not how he told it. I'll be really fucking surprised if the word "ergo" leaves Cook's lips before this show is over. But it's an actual joke, and it's not awful. Especially compared to the old friend bit it's interrupting, which is still slouching toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born.

• This motherfucker mimes EVERYTHING. He's like Marcel Marceau with Tourette's Syndrome. He's all over the stage, hands waving, body flopping, trying to set the Guinness world record for number of limbs akimbo. He's one estrus-y bonobo away from being the worst live sex show ever.

• I've figured it out. Dane Cook's comedy style is the stand-up equivalent to reality show editing. We've all seen it. You watch a reality show, and the first thing you see is a preview that shows all the interesting bits. And before every commercial, they preview those same bits. And after every commercial, they recap any bits that have happened. The actual bits, the actual content, is a tiny fraction of the whole, buttressed by constant repetition and teasing. That's how Dane Cook tells jokes. One tiny dud explosion shown from twenty slightly different camera angles. Which would only be acceptable if he were some kind of rogue undercover agent of pop culture, out to undermine and destroy the very concept of padding. He ain't.

• Second actual joke! What if a ghost came out of a Windex bottle if you used it wrong! It's nothing special, but again, it's swimming upstream against a tide of shit, so you've got to admire the joke's courage and stamina, if nothing else. It's one of the few moments throughout the whole show where I had no idea it would be coming next.

• On sneezing: "I never go with 'gesundheit'. I don't even know who says that." Um, Dane? There's this country? Called "Germany"? Perhaps you've heard of it? Full of people who speak... GERMAN. There's your first fucking hint. Of course, it turns out he knows that and was just making a bullshit transition move, because he immediately puts the lie to it by telling us that when he says it, it sounds like he's saluting Hitler.

• So now he's wondering what to say to an atheist when they sneeze. Gee, it's a fucking shame your last bit just disqualified "gesundheit" for its Nazi overtones, since all it means is "good health" and is therefore an ideal secular alternative. You fucking douchebag. Is it too much to ask that we don't have asides that completely negate the premise of the next bit? Apparently it is.

• He's just reassured us that "snarky" is an actual word, and that he didn't make it up. Thanks. I was on hold waiting for Noah Webster, and dead lexicographers don't have toll-free numbers.

• OK. So the whole last bit has been about an asshole atheist at a bus stop. And the athiest, who I assume is named Fakey Q. McStrawman, says that when he dies, he'll become "one with the earth" and turn into fertilizer and "become a tree". Which is stupid, but not problematic.
  
  Cook takes the tree thing literally, treating the atheist viewpoint as a literal belief in botanical reincarnation. Again, stupid, but not problematic.
  
  Then, and I know it's meaningless to say I saw it coming, but I FUCKING SAW IT COMING, Cook wishes for that tree to be brutally logged and processed. Which, despite being utterly predictable, is still not problematic.
  
  The problem comes from the final big punchline, in which the tree is turned into paper... that the Bible is printed on. Which the crowd goes NUTS for. Scary nuts. And for the first time, Dane Cook is actually a force for evil. Not just the apotheosis of banal. Not just the current avatar of unjoke observational mediocrity. Not just the latest in an unending cycle of dickheads gaining fame and fortune through the mystical phrase, "Am I right, folks?" At this point, Dane Cook becomes evil.