Boston-born comedian Dane Cook, hot off the release of his latest two-disc album, Retaliation, will perform tonight at Colby College's Wadsworth Gymnasium, as part of his promotional "Tourgasm" tour.
Retaliation is Cook's second album, following the immensely popular Harmful if Swallowed, released in 2003. The newest album comprises two discs, titled Want and Need.
Want features the kind of random musings reminiscent of the Harmful if Swallowed material. As per usual, Cook seeks to expose the repressed bloodlust of his audience. While in the latter he admitted to laughing at news reports about people getting killed by flying tires or killer bees, Cook goes a step further in Want by boldly discussing how he always wanted to see somebody get hit by a car.
Cook also touches upon the common human desire to be remembered by others, though his proposed solution, while original, is highly perverse. "I saw a kid eating an ice cream cone," he says, "and I ran up to him and slammed the cone into his face and said 'You remember me forever!'" Cook goes on to suggest another strategy for being remembered: defecating on the pile of coats at a party.
The most noticeable difference between Want and Harmful is Cook's story-based material. Known primarily for his random observations and outrageous ruminations, Cook takes on a new method near the end of the Want album, where he relates two stories of confrontation.
In the first of these, Cook describes an altercation in which he gets a verbal death threat after cutting the line at Walgreen's. In the second, he tells of a tense standoff with a Wendy's clerk over ketchup packets.
Need relies heavily on Cook's more vulgar source material. Its content is almost exclusively relationship-based, but it's not Paul Reiser-esque, "Oh, I left the toilet seat up" relationship humor. Cook is utterly explicit in his treatise on the modern relationship, unabashedly using himself and his own sexual escapes as a case study.
Some say that comedy is a subtle and exact art. Dane Cook didn't get the memo. While many comedians rely on wit as precise as a scalpel and as dry as a fossil, Cook delivers his brand of ribald humor with loud, wet shotgun blasts. While some comics exude pathos, Cook comes off as the human id embodied.
Tickets for tonight's show are still available for $25 at Colby's Cotter Union.