Dane Cook, ISolated INcident

Comedy, famously, is hard. Dane Cook, with his savvy self-marketing yielding blockbuster sales, makes it look easy. And he's paid for it with the kind of backlash usually reserved for sad-sack arena rockers who name their children Apple. For his fifth album, the Gen-X comic seems determined to prove that he brings his own goods. Detractors — and he has no shortage, as he notes in a funny segment called "Haters" — might not come around. But fans, who number in the platinum figures, will be tickled that he's on top of his raunchy game.

Recorded for an intimate audience at the Laugh Factory (where an unknown Cook once did one of the most hysterical bits I've ever seen, involving a childhood memory of his father in an open bathrobe), ISolated Incident is heavy on the R-rated, with hunks on porn sites, self-pleasure and the proclivities of old girlfriends. But there's also a bit of topical stuff ("I'm not racist — I've got a black president"), some sick-puppy material (such as a suggestion that the suicidal spruce up the dreary business of hanging themselves by using Christmas lights) and examples of Cook's strongest suit, the witty, energetically retold anecdote — dropping his cell phone in a public toilet, for instance. If bits about linguistic redundancies and deleting names from electronic address books are uncomfortably Carlin-esque, those, mostly, are isolated incidents.