Available at Amazon.com
Creator:
Dane Cook
Cast:
Dane Cook ………. Himself
Gary Gulman ………. Himself
Robert Kelly ………. Himself
Jay Davis ………. Himself
The Show
Dane Cook is the hottest comedian around today. His last comedy CD was the highest selling comedy CD in the last three decades. He has been in numerous movies and has sold out arenas across the country. He even recently had his own comedy concert special on HBO. He has been everywhere, except for maybe having his own TV show. That would be the next logical step. Enter HBO and Dane Cook’s Tourgasm.
Tourgasm is a show that followed Dane Cook and three other comedians as they toured the country and performed 20 shows in 30 nights in 2005. Dane could have done this himself and it would have successful. But Dane wanted to bring along some of his friends and help them get some “screen” time. At the time, Dane and the others didn’t know this “documentary” would air on HBO. They were just being themselves, while living together on a tour bus.
They wanted to live like rock stars and travel from city to city on a tour bus. That’s exactly what they did. It was some pretty tight living conditions, though. As you might imagine, living this close together to three other people for a month got to be a little stressful. As a result, there was quite a bit of fighting on the bus. When they are on stage, they are all friends. But on the bus, they spent most of the early going fighting with each other.
That is the main problem with this show. It’s a show about comedians, but it’s not always funny. Robert and Jay constantly fight with each other. Gary eventually gets tired of everything and leaves the tour AND the show for a few days without any explanation. Dane tries to hold everything together, but even the stress gets to him. So you get a lot of drama that was not needed for a show like this.
Now you could probably live with the amount of drama in the show, if there was some good standup thrown in to laugh at. There lies another problem with this show. If you have heard any of Dane’s recent comedy CDs or specials, you will have heard 98% of the jokes that Dane tells during this show. There is not much new stuff here. That makes a little sense since this was shot in 2005 and he was touring the country to PROMOTE his comedy CD at the time. There is almost a year and a half between filming and airing. So the jokes are already “dated” by the time the show hits HBO. What about the rest of the comedians? They are all funny, but you can never really get into their acts since they only show small parts of each routine. They only show highlights of each nightly performance and that doesn’t add up to much.
With all of the negatives of the show being said, lets talk about what does work. The show is still centered on Dane Cook and he can’t help but be funny. Therefore, the show is still funny at times. The best part of the show is probably when all four guys go on group outings during the day. They get together and do all kinds of activities together. However, these are hit or miss as well. Still, they are fairly amusing diversions from the tour bus. Another thing I liked was Dane helping the other comedians. That was interesting to watch, but there was hardly enough in there to make things better.
On the bright side, the extras on this DVD set make up for the lack of quality in the actual show. There are lots of stuff to watch there and most of it is pretty funny and entertaining. They may not be enough to raise the level of the show, but they at least add something to the final product.
Dane Cook seems like he can do nothing wrong. This show is good reminder that Dane IS still human and even “The Dane Train” can get derailed every now and then. If you are looking for a non-stop laughfest of a show, look again. Better yet go get Dane’s other HBO Comedy Special, A Vicious Circle. That’s Dane at his best. This is just odd. The potential was there for a lot of things. It could have been a really funny show. It could have been an insightful show about the world of comedy. It could have been a show all about Dane Cook. It could have been all of this and much more, but it’s not. It’s nowhere close to that. You have been warned.
The Video:
The video is given in 16:9 fullscreen color. The transfer is good with little distortion. Pretty much the quality you expect from a TV show on HBO. Nothing more and nothing less.
The Audio:
The audio included is available in English Dolby 2.0 sound. Again, this is a TV show, so it’s nothing special. No real problems here either, though.
The Extras:
Audio Commentaries –
All four comedians comment are all 9 episodes of this show. Dane, Gary, Robert, and Jay are comedians, so you might expect these commentaries to be pretty funny. You would be correct. Very entertaining to listen to after you have seen the original episodes.
Multiple Tourgasm Shorts –
There are 20 of these little short featurettes. They run around 2 or 3 minutes each. They are called “What is Tourgasm?”, “Why Tourgasm?”, “Dane Cook”, “Gary Gulman”, “Jay Davis”, “Robert Kelly”, “The Traveling Prison”, “From Day to Night”, “The Dane Train”, “Activity Fun Time”, “Power Play”, “Tricks of the Trade”, “Dane’s Inspiration”, “The Red Tape”, “Nostalgia”, “Element of Surprise”, “Humble Beginnings”, “Fighting on the Road”, “Dane and Charity”, and “Cameras Off”. These talk about all kinds of subjects. Why the show was made, how it was made, more about the comedians, interaction between them, and basically any kind of “behind-the-scenes” stuff you wanted to know about. They are short, but they combine to provide a lot of information.
“Conversations About Comedy” Featurette –
This featurette is the four comedians talking about comedy. How they grew up and got to where they are now, etc. We see some of their early standup routines along with various other things. Basically, this is a history piece. Pretty entertaining, though.
“Hecklers” Featurette –
This is one of the funniest featurettes. I love hecklers and these guys love to DESTROY their hecklers! All four guys talk about hecklers here, and it’s pretty funny.
“The Bobby Kelly ‘F**K’ Montage” –
This is a short montage of Robert saying his favorite word over and over again. It’s pretty amusing to watch this, but nothing special.
“Jay Davis: Mr. Sensitive Montage” –
Another montage. This one is all about Jay’s infamous new joke he tried out at almost every show. Jay is “Mr. Sensitive and he’s killing everyone with kindness”.
If you watched the show on HBO and didn’t like it, I would actually recommend you renting this for the extras alone. They are entertaining and everything the show should have been. It would be hard for me to recommend a purchase of this show to even die-hard Dane Cook fans, though. In the end, these are probably the only kind of people who would even think about buying this.
