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Review: Daniel Tosh at the Paramount
Those of us who are not cute sorority girls or the guys who follow them around like terriers in ballcaps, hate Dane Cook. If comedy were nutrition, Cook would be a Tab and a Milky Way bar. The anti-Pryor sells out 18,000-seat arenas because his tight-jeaned brand of physical “comedy” shows off his tush. We curse his name.
But Daniel Tosh must really despise Dane the Bane. Although Tosh, who played a sold-out show at the Paramount Theatre Friday, is sick and twisted and truly original, he’s often lumped in with Cook because they’re both glicks, which is how to pronounce GLC - Good Looking Comedians. If you’ve ever drawn a thousand UT students on a night when their basketball team was playing for a trip to the Final Four… you might be a glick.
A fairly new phenomenon, the attractive funnyman era (ushered in by Jon Stewart,, a lame standup who eventually found his niche when he sat behind a desk) is a far cry from the days when you looked like Buddy Hackett or Woody Allen or Don Rickles or Totie Fields when it was your job to make people laugh, at a two-drink minimum. You became a comedian because your father was an abusive drunk, not because you found this killer web designer who can set you up. The best standup is revenge for not getting dates, for being left out of life’s reindeer games.
Daniel Tosh is a surfer for crissakes! That’s at the top of the pyramid of popularity. Tosh could be Tom Brady’s brother, but somehow he taps into the rage of a geek. Perhaps growing up the son of a Florida minister gave Tosh his blue rebellious streak. (Tellingly, his exit theme was “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone, not Dusty’s “Son of a Preacher Man.”)
Tosh’s comedic persona is that of a self-centered, misogynistic, politically inconceivable spoiled lout who has no use for people unless they give him sex or pump themselves full of steroids for his entertainment. He even feigned contempt for his adoring Tosh-eebas, chiding them for not laughing louder or in the right places. He kept looking at a watch he set on his water table because, he said, he wasn’t going a minute over the contracted performance time. Indeed, the show ended with a dud at exactly the one-hour mark, about 20 minutes after Tosh had run out of new things to say.
The comic had a snippet of good topical material about the presidential race, likening Hillary Clinton to Eli Manning (“She’s not even the best one in her house, but she just might have enough to win the big one”), but about 2/3 of Tosh’s wickedly crude set can’t be published here. His penchant for threading absurd sequences would also get lost in print, but let’s see what we can get away with.
He doesn’t go to strip clubs to “make it rain, “ he said, alluding to hip hop jargon for throwing dollar bills in the air. “I like to make it hail. I throw handfuls of change at (strippers) and if they yell ‘hey! hey!’ I tell them I’m a baller on a budget.”
He purported to be conservative except on one issue. “I want to wear a t-shirt that says ‘I heart abortion,’” he said. “On the back it’ll say ‘problem solved.’” He then went into a bit about the morning after pill, “or as I like to call it ‘breakfast in bed.’ Have you read where some women have died after taking the morning after pill? Talk about two birds with one stone. Looks like I’m going to the game after all.” The date night crowd roared at every unflinching observation.
Tosh doesn’t do much physical shtick, exaggerating frailness for effect, but he had one hilarious visual bit about how it makes more sense to sit backwards on a toilet, thus turning the tank into a place to rest your head or to eat a bowl of cereal. He was also a source of arcane references; who else is telling Gilbert Grape jokes these days?
Despite all the howls and kneeslaps all around, Tosh showed that he’s got a way to go before his comedy specials air on HBO instead of Comedy Central. Until he can do an hour without recycling old material (the Nebraska routine? Again?) he’s not ready for the majors. When Tosh did try to woodshed new stuff, he had to clumsily consult a couple scraps of paper, saying “not tonight” until he found one that might work. A joke about using the guy who draws on the UPS commercials as a Pictionary ringer was inspired. A diatribe about race car driver Danica Patrick not being that attractive wasn’t. “Let’s file that one under ‘room to grow’” Tosh said when one of his toddlers fell.
“Room to grow” sums up this glickster quite well. He sells out venues like the Paramount every night of the week, often adding second or third shows. But as Dane Cook and Larry the Cable Guy and Carlos Mencia prove, the mark of a great comedian is not putting fannies in seats. You haven’t really made it until, like Chris Rock, like Bill Hicks, like George Lopez and Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby and Sam Kinison and Jerry Seinfeld and George Carlin and St. Richard, you haven’t made the A-team until you can kill for an hour and make time stand still.
It’s probably the hardest thing in all of show biz- getting a new standup set together. But if you’ve got only half an hour of fresh material, don’t do “an evening with…” Retire bits that have been shown on TV or heard on records. I know college kids don’t know any better; their taste in comedy is generally as bad as the music they choose to embrace. But in respect for the craft, Tosh should package himself with another known comic until he’s truly ready to headline a venue that doesn’t have “chuckles,” “giggles” or “funny bone” on the sign out front.
Well, this is supposed to be a music blog, so we’ll get you out with this incredible performance by Nina “Sinnerman” Simone:
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Comments
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By VV
March 29, 2008 3:27 PM | Link to this
this Michael Corcoran is a fool. Dane Cook although attractive is one of the funniest people to ever do comedy. Ive been around comedians and comedy clubs my whole life. I know them all and DC is the real deal. A 400,000 seat sold out tour and you think its because he is cute?
jealous moron good luck writing for this dumpy online paper
VV
By Sal
March 31, 2008 10:59 AM | Link to this
Tab and a Milky Way bar? Corky, you are being too nice to Cook - He doesn’t have the substance of cotton candy…
By kc
February 10, 2009 4:55 AM | Link to this
This weekend, we saw him live in Louisville, Ky. I searched reviews for him and found this one. The parts about his material are identical to the one I would write today. It would appear, a year later, he is telling the exact same jokes. Every joke you mentioned was in his set. He came out irritated about playing a club venue, mentioned several times he made to much money to watch people eat while he told jokes. (I get that, but don’t book the gig if you don’t like it….)
He had long periods of pause with the comedic mood dying and the crowd getting bored. He had multiple pauses as he mumbled across his notes and kept looking at his watch to announce he would be “done with his contracted time soon”