There are comics that respect Dane Cook,
That's convenient that you didn't name one. I guess we'll just have to take your word for it.
Alot of comics have similar jokes, yeah he has a few bits that resemble Louis CK, and I was on the band wagon with the Dane Cook steals material blah blah blah, but three bits out of his entire catologue of material doesn't mean thats all he does.
It's not just CK. You can literally spend hours watching similar examples of his “originality” on YouTube if you're so inclined. It's hardly an isolated incident.
I just got “The State” on DVD (finally!) and there's a sketch called “Light Coma” about a guy who is in a coma for 2 hours and wakes up to find all sorts of crazy things have happened while he was away. His wife is remarried, he's lost his job, etc. It reminded me of a “Kids in the Hall” sketch called “Rockey” where Kevin McDonald repeatedly storms out of his home while fighting with his girlfriend. Every time he comes back moments later he finds that she's moved on and remarried, had a child, the child grows and graduates etc. For all their differences there are a lot of similarities. I can't figure out which one came first, the best I can figure is that they both aired in 1993 so it's hard to say who came up with it first but that's truly a case where two comedic entities came up with similar concepts and executed them in significantly-different ways.
You don't get that vibe with Cook. You note the similarity and the evidence that all the similarities of similar bits come from very specific sources. Then he dumbs it down and adds a bunch of spastic yelling and exaggerated physicality and before you know it some 14-year-old girl is embedding it in her friend's MySpace comments.
Most of the time it only takes common sense to detect when two people arrive at the same concept independently and when one person just blatantly steals it, and Cook's “writing” obviously sets off the plagiarist alarm in a lot of peoples minds.
Now back to Coulier:
Geeze, cut the guy some slack!
Why?
Why does someone deserve “slack” when they've been consistently lame for 30 years? Call me crazy but I kinda think it works the other way around: that you have to prove that you're not a lame no-talent hack because there are a lot of those around.
Coulier has had 30 years to do that.
In comedy you have to accept that Bill Murray is going to do stuff like “Charlie's Angels” and “Garfield”, David Cross is going to do “Alvin and the Chipmunks”, George Carlin is going to do “Shining Time Station”, Richard Pryor is going to do “The Toy” (which I actually kinda like, but c'mon, it's Richard Pryor in a kids movie) etc. What all those comedians have in common is that they have truly great things under their belt that redeem them.
If the last few decades have shown us anything it's that you simply can't make it in comedy by only taking credible gigs. The greatest comedians in the world have awful sell-out moments. It's the nature of professional comedy.
The thing is, Coulier doesn't have so much as one shining moment of excellence that redeems him for 30 years of garbage. For the sake of argument I'd even take something average but it's not there.
When Coulier does something so great that someone like me has to give it to him I'll agree that he doesn't deserve the grief. I'm still waiting.
