Dane Cook’s Tourgasm

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Neither funny nor particularly interesting, Dane Cook’s Tourgasm is an experiment that one doubts panned out quite like the creators had hoped. It’s not necessarily bad. I just have a boundless indifference toward it.

The premise is that Dane Cook, the biggest thing to happen to stand-up comedy in a while, gets on a bus with three other comics, and they tour around the country, doing twenty shows in thirty days. Along for the ride are Robert Kelly, Gary Gulman, and Jay Davis, or, as the opening credits keep reminding us, “the instigator”, “the conflicted”, and “the newbie”, respectively.

So what happens on this month-long road trip? Essentially, a lot of padding and not much comedy. The guys play touch football. Then they play paintball. Then they go horseback riding. All for no reason. The nine shows that this set includes generally are structured as follows: pointless argument, another pointless argument, pointless activity, confessional by Dane Cook that clearly attempts to create drama that isn’t there, another pointless activity, another pointless argument, more obviously manufactured drama, and finally a comedy show.

The idea was clearly to let comedy take a back seat to watching how these comedians act in real life. That’s fine. The problem is, none of them are particularly interesting or even likable. I remain a big fan of Dane Cook’s standup routines, but his personality gets a little grating, and it’s clear he looks down on the other comics. He’s also a sore loser with a ridiculous competitive streak, as can be witnessed from a few go-kart and paintball episodes.

Gary Gulman plays the role of the outsider, and at one point completely disappears from the tour – Cook mentions he’s gone, but thanks to some creaky editing we’re on to the next activity before we find out why. Robert Kelly, meanwhile, is sort of like that jerk your friend likes but you can’t understand why – he starts and embellishes arguments so much you begin to think the producers are telling him to. The guy to bear most of the brunt of this is Jay Davis, the lowest on the totem pole and the least experienced.

Davis also may or may not be a practicing celibate, and he may or may not be a born-again Christian; there are vague references to his religion and his “not by choice” celibacy. I bring this up because it highlights a major pratfall of the show: it shows us these guys without actually managing to tell us a thing about their lives. With no one to particularly care about, then, we’re