Day Two Hundred and Thirty-six - Daniel Tosh: Completely Serious, "But I don't know any older Samoans, so The Rock is my dad."

To say that I hate Daniel Tosh is a mistake. I don't hate Tosh. In fact, I think he can be a pretty funny guy. It's just that he's so damned random... all the freakin' time!

Take this hour long set, Completely Serious. You barely have enough time to catch your breath before he's on to something else entirely that has absolutely no connection to the joke previous. It's like one long string of ADHD rambling that occasionally is hilarious, as if James Joyce and Jackass had a love child.

I say occasionally because he's also hella offensive.

Racism, sexism, pedophilia, making fun of the handicapped. If there is something, anything out there that will push your buttons in the wrong way, Tosh is sure to find it, then call you on it immediately. It's a perplexing duality of discomfort and hypocrisy. When it comes to comedy, I think that's a good thing because it brings us all together at the bottom of the barrel. You don't have to worry about high brow or low brow jokes, intellectual versus frat humor, because by shaking the tree trunk, he sends us all tumbling down, no matter what our preferences.

In that, Tosh is pretty damn genius.

But the lengths he has to go to get us all there... and the constant skipping from one topic to another, it's all so annoyingly scattered.

There are a few jokes that definitely miss the mark, particularly when he (of course) randomly starts doing a silly voice that obviously goes nowhere, either with me or the recorded audience. But that never really stops him as he moves so briskly along that you've forgotten the duds in order to try and track where he currently is... which is usually several jokes down the line and way off that topic.

I think that the set is decent. It never comes close to "grand" or "perfect" thanks to his style... as the best comedy (at least, to me) has connection, an organic thread flowing through it, not just throwing darts at the wall... but it still managed to pull quite a few laughs (and more than a few of them guilty ones) through sheer force of numbers and variety.

I can see where people might be turned off by him... particularly as he has no qualms going after race, sex, misogyny, you name it... but it's probably worth at least a single viewing, if not more.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~