Tourgasm debuts on HBO

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on June 12th, 2006

The new HBO documentary (they insist it’s a reality show) is wildly entertaining. And it all comes down from the top. Dane Cook is ridiculously optimistic, positive and saintlike in his role as tour guide. The Tourgasm tour starts out in our beloved Burbank, where Gary Gulman, Robert Kelly and Jay Davis board the bus and head north to the Bay Area for their first show at Sonoma State.

While the venues are larger and the transportation a bit more luxurious than the vast majority of us are accustomed to, I think we can relate to nearly everything else that’s depicted in the half-hour episode. It’s full of laughs. It’s full of stupidity. It depicts comics delighting large halls filled with enthusiastic fans. It’s upbeat like hardly anything else that’s ever been centered on standup. There were moments of joy and frivolity in Seinfeld’s “The Comedian,” but it was low-key. There are occasional standup specials that attempt to capture, in taped intros, what it’s really like to be a comic, but they usually opt for the cool, detached, ironic thing or they go too far in the other direction and depart from reality altogether with wacky, zany fantasy scenarios. And then there was last year’s Comedians of Comedy Tour movie that was a downer from start to finish.

Cook is relentlessly upbeat, to reuse an overused phrase. Even the moments of tension– no doubt included to provide some sort of dramatic contrast– were quickly defused, often to great comic effect. And the editing seems to have been done by someone (hold onto your hats, people) by someone who not only understands comics and standup comedy, but actually likes standup comics and standup comedy.

Remind us again how television will kill standup.

And remind us why anyone reads Variety). (And, after reading the Variety review, please recall that it’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you.)

And the dusty turds who write for Hollywood Reporter said similarly sad (and embarassingly revealing) things about the show. This is a watershed moment in the Standup Comedy/Mainstream Media divide. We will watch the rest of the series and also monitor the reaction of the staid, dying MSM Entertainment Hacks.

We can only conclude that something else is bothering them. Perhaps they’re throwing a hissy/pissy fit because Cook has done the unthinkable: He’s achieved a wicked large level of fame and a measurable amount of power without the help of the Antique Media (gasp!). His skillful manipulation of the internet and his navigation of the oft treacherous entertainment waters in fairly unorthodox ways was enough to rocket him into a position usually reserved for people who were “anointed,” who were “deserving.” The hate-filled prose spun out by the Entertainment Press betrays their horror at the heretical path that Cook has taken. This oughta get interesting.

This series represents nothing short of a nightmare for the MSM.

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