I think Dane Cook is a funny person, he has a natural comedic sense and can execute ideas well. He has good timing and plenty of energy and physical skills. And many of his ideas here are quite interesting and deep, even though the topics are pretty common (relationships, sex, family). The problem is that he goes for too many easy jokes. Weak, obvious ones. Maybe it's because of the huge, fanatical audience. Maybe that made him indulge more. It's a shame because I think he's capable of hilarious, insightful comedy. There are glimpses of it but too often it's interrupted by unnecessary additions or side-tracking.The Beatles stopped touring in 1965 because of their screaming fans - they couldn't hear themselves or their music. Pretty depressing really. This audience also seems to be allergic to quiet - they appear to have an urgent need to fill any and every moment of silence they can find with screaming, shouting, cheering and applause. It's pretty annoying. It's amazing that adults can get this excited about a regular human being. They're just dying to touch him or be near him. I can understand laughter and some applause, but here it keeps cutting off his flow and comes at inappropriate times - they're clearly desperate for (his) attention.I like true stories but I guess every comedian lies and exaggerates - it's basically part of the job. Still, it's annoying if most of it sounds completely made up which is the case with this special. Nevertheless, Dane is good at telling stories. It's just that they drag a bit. If I were a teenager they might be funny. But you can generally tell where he's going with things and you want him to get to the point.I think he just lacks a little artistic discipline. The crowd seems to love it which is important but you want to create something timeless as well. There has to be something personal about it. Dane comes across more as a craftsman. Skilled but not trying to do anymore than the minimum necessary. It's a shame because he seems very talented and intelligent and funny. He doesn't seem to be working anywhere near his full potential - he's aiming for what makes people laugh (including cheap jokes) rather than what's truly, meaningfully funny.

Though I thought that many of the laughs were undeserved and perhaps at some points forced, I thought that the actual performance was not all that bad. Firstly, talking for 2 hours and 12 minutes is an impressive feat in itself, but to a large crowd and maintaining that kind of energy throughout the performance is really good. Also, his material is not that bad at all. Though his stuff may not agree with certain senses of humor, I think that there is at least one joke for everyone, however, there is almost certainly a cringe-worthy moment for everyone as well. Thirdly, his improv is quite high standard (excluding the Jake part)and found it generally added to his performance. Finally, his observations are quite good, and though many of his observations were not specific to my context, he managed to draw the audience in to his point of view. Top Stuff.

DANE COOK: VICIOUS CIRCLE was the severely overrated HBO debut of red-hot stand up comedian Dane Cook, wisely filmed in his hometown to make him seem a lot funnier than he really is. Cook was first introduced to HBO audiences with the dreadfully boring documentary TOURGASM which was then capped off with this comedy concert filmed in Cook's hometown of Boston. Apparently, Bostonians find this guy hysterically funny because the audience at this concert is shown going out of their minds at every single word that comes out of this guy's mouth and I just didn't get. Cook seems full of himself, self-congratulatory, and madly in love with the sound of his own voice. The nucleus of some very funny material is here, but Cook blows everything way out of proportion...the guy lakes twenty-minutes to tell a five minute joke and his material hardly merits the 90 minutes (!) that HBO gave him while really funny guys like Chris Rock and DL Hughley only get 60 minutes. For hard-core Cook fans only.

You know, we fool ourselves. We clump things together because of characteristics that show we do not understand. For instance, we have this category of "hobbies," a strange way to organize things we choose to do.Comedy is like that. I believe. If we laugh at things, we clump them together as if they had something in common.So this is called comedy. I think I'd call it great storytelling. These aren't jokes — they're life, spun in a way that we have to laugh. Its the Bill Cosby style of storytelling. Stuff from marriage, childhood, friends. Long, long introspective memories.What works here is that the man does draw us unto his stories. He's quite talented at this. He's less talented at turning that attention into the sort of startling twists or insights that constitute great humor. But it hardly matters because our investment in the story is deep enough for us to laugh at less clever comic devices.If you are interested in who you are, surely you are interested in why you laugh. This helps.And you'll laugh too.He's on a small circular stage. Look closely at the design of the pattern. Its a hand.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.