COMEDIANS aren't supposed to be happy, just the opposite, but Dane Cook is the Disneyland of comics: He's the happiest, most uncomplicated place on Earth.
He's Seacrest-psyched, boy voted most likely. Cutest. Funniest. Coolest. For Cook, this is no ironic pose a la Andy Kaufman; it's a whole insufferable ethos, integral to the rise of his career. He's become huge by asserting that the comic mind does not come from alienation and restlessness but from adoration and social connection -- the comic as your instant-messaging best pal.
To watch his HBO special "Vicious Circle," which airs Monday night, is to be both disappointed in Cook for foisting his surface act on people with such energetic impunity and in audiences for drinking the stuff in as if it were vanguard.
You could also, for variety's sake, be disappointed in HBO for giving the wrong comedian the right kind of platform -- a 90-minute concert act recorded recently at the FleetCenter arena in Cook's native Boston, apparently in front of some 18,000 people.
To the question, "What happened to stand-up?" Cook might very well be the depressing answer: It put product in its hair, dumbed itself down and became as eager to please as a trainee at a TGI Friday's. And still it got itself a series, "Tourgasm," which ended its run on HBO last month.
"Tourgasm" was a conspicuously slight and infomercial-like ad to boost Cook's rabid popularity among college-age fans; the rest was filler, Cook and his three comedian underlings in various states of homoerotic, roughhousing repose.
Now HBO, as part of a multiplatform deal, presents Cook in a stand-up special. These were once upon a time the province of active minds and voices (Robert Klein, George Carlin, Roseanne, Chris Rock). But having long watched the brand slacken, HBO has now lent it to the boy most likely to help them succeed wooing younger subscribers.
It makes sense, business sense, anyway: Cook might very well be the next Rob Schneider, or Tom Green, or Ashton Kutcher, or some three-headed beast incorporating some of each. ("Employee of the Month," a comedy in which he costars with rumored girlfriend Jessica Simpson, opens next month. Others are on the assembly line.)
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An online connection, the payoff
COOK, then, is a comic-on-the-verge, but with the twist of the new -- he's huge among the kids who download his bits off iTunes and onto their cell-phones.
