DAN TESSITORE

When I first saw this promo shot for Dane Cook's Isolated Incident, which premiered Sunday night, I thought it was intended to convey an older, wiser, and darker Dane - that he had finally tossed the whole frat boy image. Well, he did, sort of. He was still decked out in tee shirt and jeans, but he was a lot less animated, a lot less loud, and a little darker.

I long ago gave up being a Dane Cook hater. I never liked his act much, and I didn't find this new hour all that great, either, but I've been doing comedy just long enough to realize that the only people who care about a comics' success, relative to every other comic, are other comics (and a small but rabid core of fans who have never done comedy but feel qualified to judge everyone who does).

Try telling one of the millions of Denis Leary fans that a few of his funniest bits on No Cure for Cancer were lifted from Bill Hicks, and the likely response will be, "Who's Bill Hicks?" That's not to say I condone stealing material. I don't - it is the cardinal sin in comedy. But if Dane Cook lifted material from Louis C.K., that's between Dane Cook and Louis C.K. It's not as if I would have headlined The Laugh Factory for a televised special last month if Dane Cook had been exiled from comedy, so what business is it of mine?

If I were forced at gunpoint to bet money on who lifted what from whom in the whole Hicks/Leary debate, yeah, I'd bet the material in question was Hicks', if only because Leary never demonstrated that level of creative genius afterward. But I don't know, and I don't care. To anyone who still cares about this tired debate 18 years after No Cure... and 15 years after Hicks' DEATH, two things:

1. Hicks and Leary worked together. More than once. They did Montreal at the same time. They were also notorious drinkers and inhalers of Peruvian marching powder, so who knows - really - what may have been bandied back and forth between lines gakked up off the back of some green room toilet?
2. Write something that anyone would want to steal, or shut the fuck up. Thanks.