Dane Cook - Vicious Circle

Don't look to Cook for satirical insights on politics, the war, or even pop culture. His world view is much narrower. In Vicious Circle he expounds on the pleasures and traps of lying, male crying, being sneezed on, his father's robe, bad relationships, and sundry sexual matters that cannot be printed here. Cook takes awhile to get where he's going, but his digressions are often funnier than the pay offs. He puts the brakes on one story during which he mimes driving a car to remark that if he were actually driving this way, he would be all over the road. During other bits, he parses the different spray modes on Windex, and takes the phrase "being cheated on" literally. And it takes some kind of associative genius to compare a certain female body part to a high school stage theatre curtain. The less than well received Employee of the Month aside, Cook is currently king of the comedy hill. Vicious Circle offers a time capsule look at these heady good times for the great Dane. As for where he goes from here, the good news is that Steve Martin once filled arenas like this. The bad news: So did Andrew Dice Clay. --Donald Liebenson