Continuing a month in which comedy fans are forced to go to the mat for the inherent freedom of comedic expression, even in its lamest forms, Dane Cook returned to L.A.'s Uncomfortable Laugh Factory—site of previous ideological stands over his own chainsaw-fucking of whores and co-headliner Daniel Tosh's rape hypotheticals—with some fresh material about the Aurora theater shooting, honed after one week of considering the tragedy and determining how it could be alleviated with the healing laughter of gallows humor. Or, in Cook's case, used as a long, convoluted setup for a vaudevillian rimshot of a punchline.
"So I heard that the guy came into the theater about 25 minutes into [The Dark Knight Rises],” Cook says in the below footage obtained by The Daily Caller. “And I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, but the movie is pretty much a piece of crap. Yeah, spoiler alert. I know that if none of that would have happened, I'm pretty sure that somebody in that theater, about 25 minutes in, realizing it was a piece of crap, was probably like ‘Ugh, fucking shoot me.'" Probably! That would certainly be humorously ironic, considering what happened. (Some people were fucking shot.)
As you can hear for yourself, Cook's audience responds with groans that slowly morph into laughs, though outside of the comedy club, he's garnering some much louder criticism for being insensitive and ill-timed—as in, the joke is "too soon," not that it takes approximately 30 seconds before Cook finally arrives at his weak gag predicated on the questionable premise that The Dark Knight Rises is a "piece of crap" so awful it would inspire someone to wish death upon themselves, as presented by the star of Good Luck Chuck. And again, somehow we're once again having a conversation over what should and shouldn't be considered off-limits in comedy, all based on one of its most loosely defined practitioners. But hey, that's the envelope-pushing Dane Cook for you: He's like Lenny Bruce minus all that boring insight.