Dane Cook is a comedian for “American Idol” times: youthful, accessible and karaoke-good.
His dead-on rendition of an exciting new headliner (circa 20 years ago), coupled with Brad Pitt looks (for a comic) and Internet savvy (myspace.com/danecook), propelled him into a development deal with HBO, a relationship whose latest outing, premiering Sunday night, is “Tourgasm.”
“Tourgasm,” a reality-type show in which Cook goes on the road in a rock-star bus with three lesser lights, is certain to excite the young fans who sent his “Retaliation” CD soaring up the charts. If you’re among the stranded, it isn’t you–or wait, sorry, it is: Cook is as bulletproof among fans as he is unspectacular to anyone who’s watched much comedy in the previous two decades.
HBO evidently is eager to co-opt Cook’s new-media viability as much as Cook wants the cred that HBO conveys. For Cook, it’s not TV. For HBO, it’s not TV, either. It’s iTunes.
“Tourgasm” is the 10 p.m. Sunday nightcap in a block of new comedies that includes the third-season debut of “Entourage” (9 p.m.) and the premiere of a sitcom called “Lucky Louie” (9:30 p.m.), starring comedian Louis C.K.
The comics that make up Dane Cook’s “Tourgasm” posse–Jay Davis, Gary Gulman and Robert Kelly–convey the same airborne sense of sponging off of a star that Vince’s buds exude on “Entourage.” Off the bus, they play with toys; on the bus, they sleep, fart and discuss porn. Here’s what HBO hates to hear: It’s been done before, and funnier, on Comedy Central’s “Comedians of Comedy,” for one.
Cook is very likable, very high energy, and he has all the well-minted comic’s moves down pat–the sound effects, the jumping about, the patter. It’s as a persona that he stands out–the rock-star following, the comic as Smashing Pumpkin.
But the world at large doesn’t tax him. On “Tourgasm,” Cook is working the college circuit, where a comedian might get a chance to discuss the war in Iraq. But he’s an embodiment of the depressing axiom among comics that nothing bums out an audience faster than politics (except for comics like Lewis Black, whose newest HBO special, premiering at 9 p.m. Saturday, is called “Red, White & Screwed”).
Funny, this aversion to the world outside his bus, because Cook is at least partly a politician, shaking each and every hand and signing each and every bra and responding to each and every instant message from fans, having blazed a trail for himself with his hit Web site.
” ‘Tourgasm’ is about two things,” he tells the camera, in a moment of reflection after the show at Sonoma State. “It’s about comedy and our love for comedy and our passion for getting up and entertaining … people, and it’s about finding your voice, and sharing your life with other people.”
His legion all know the back story behind his hand signal, the Su-Fi. It’s all kind of Scientology-seeming on the one hand, but ingenious and adaptive on the other: The jokester as your Friendster.
SERIES PREMIERE
Tourgasm
10 p.m., Sunday, HBO
