Dane Cook Isolated Incident CD

Halfway through Dane Cook's 2009 CD ISOLATED INCIDENT, released a couple years after his star hit supernova unleashing the inevitable backlash, on the track "Haters," Cook deals with the his critics; he jokes about Googling his own name and then, when he finds the glut of "Dane Cook Sucks" sites, exclaims, "This Dane Cook's a [jerk].I'm not a fan anymore." A few minutes later, Cook is viciously eviscerating another virtual heckler to the crowd's delight. This is Cook in a nutshell: abrasive, beloved, and ready to turn his wit's rapier on himself at a moment's notice. On ISOLATED INCIDENT, the jokes fly with the spring-heeled delivery and whip-crack energy one expects from a Dane Cook show.
In the liner notes to Isolated Incident, Dane Cook thanks "all the people that stayed by me when my world was collapsing." Most would think he is referring to the ongoing accusations of joke stealing from his peers or maybe some Hollywood vehicles that bombed, but the thick-skinned comedian is actually talking about something truly difficult, the deaths of both his mother and father in a two-year span. As a result, Isolated Incident is, to a degree, the "darker" and "more personal" album the pre-release hype trumpeted, one that draws laughs when it goes gross or mean and becomes a little unsettling when the elephant-in-the-room issue of Cook's "Haters" is addressed. The track comes after a very moving "Mom and Pops" and then gives way to "Adoption," with Cook thinking about a family-oriented future. That's a soul-searching whirlwind in just ten minutes, and as the routine moves on to some hackneyed topics, it seems a great missed opportunity that this caring, sharing, and most of all genuine Cook wasn't explored further. His material about the recently elected President Obama was already hackneyed as the CD was being released, and if you haven't heard a routine about the voodoo doll-type joy of deleting people from your cell phone, you didn't attend your local comedy club during the 2008 season. Speaking of comedy clubs, Isolated Incident was recorded at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood, an intentionally small show for the stadium-sized star Cook. Not the album to start with but the loyal fan gets a very different, revealing kind of show, plus a bonus DVD featuring the "making of" this rare gig. ~ David Jeffries