Funny how HBO has changed

Dane Cook is a comedian for these “American Idol” times: youthful, accessible and karaoke-good. His dead-on rendition of an exciting new headliner (circa 20 years ago), coupled with Brad Pitt looks (for a comic) and Internet savvy (www.myspace.com/danecook, with his 1,138,772 “friends”), propelled him into a development deal with HBO, a relationship whose latest outing, premiering at 11 Sunday night, is “Tourgasm.”

“Tourgasm,” a reality-type show in which Cook goes on the road in a rock-star bus with three lesser lights, is certain to excite the young fans who sent his “Retaliation” CD soaring up the charts and leave everyone else behind. If you’re among the stranded, it isn’t you -- or wait, sorry, I’m afraid it is: Cook is as bulletproof among fans as he is unspectacular to anyone who’s watched much comedy in the previous two decades.

You should double-check this, but I think HBO once broke emerging comics as artists, not as audience-pleasers who were destined to please the next audience. But the pay cable network is coming off a season of arch, Hollywood-insider comedies such as “The Comeback,” which not only failed to catch on but also made the network seem dangerously removed from the mainstream. That trend now lurches in the opposite direction: HBO evidently is eager to co-opt Cook’s new-media viability as much as Cook wants the cred that HBO conveys. For Cook, it’s not TV. For HBO, it’s not TV, either. It’s iTunes.

“Tourgasm” is the Sunday nightcap in a block of new comedies that includes the third-season debut of “Entourage” and the premiere of a sitcom called “Lucky Louie,” starring another comedian, Louis C.K., who previously wrote for “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and “The Chris Rock Show.”

If “Tourgasm” is steeped in VH1, both “Entourage” and “Lucky Louie” exude that old HBO counter-network-intuitiveness, at different extremes: “Entourage” is basically “Friends” with Hummers, while “Lucky Louie” attempts to repudiate all that “Friends” did to the sitcom in the first place.

“Lucky Louie,” about a young couple with honest money troubles, is harshly lighted, and it has the studio audience and laugh track; it feels as if you’ve happened across a British sitcom or a rerun of “MADtv.”

Louie is a part-time mechanic in a muffler shop, and his wife, Kim (Pamela Adlon, the voice of Bobby on “King of the Hill”), is a full-time hospital nurse. The supporting cast of misfits, used unevenly so far, are unwashed types normally relegated to guest-star status (Michael G. Hagerty, for instance, was the occasionally seen apartment superintendent on “Friends,” but here he’s Louie’s best friend who cracks weary-wise and smokes cigarettes).

Kim takes the bus to work, and Louie wears T-shirts that have shrunk and faded in the laundry. The sets on “Louie” suggest a decaying burg -- doughnut shop, fenced-in playground, check-cashing place.

This all makes it a rarity, socioeconomically; most network shows, post-”Roseanne,” uniformly abandoned portrayals of the lower-middle class -- the expression “blue collar” becoming network shorthand for anything that wasn’t like “Frasier.”

“Louie,” then, recalls the era of “Sanford and Son,” “All in the Family” and “Good Times.” This is HBO chasing itself by the tail, for wasn’t it “Sex and the City” that ushered in glossy, single-camera quasi-sophistication, which in turn balkanized the multi-camera family comedy as red state?

“Louie’s” opening scene is an intentionally stock network sitcom tableau: kewpie-doll kid, sardonic dad are at breakfast, the 4-year-old Lucy (Kelly Gould) peppering her father with cute-as-a-button inquisitiveness, questions ranging from why is it still dark outside to why didn’t dad pay attention in school.

The first answer (“the Earth goes around, and when it turns a certain amount the sun shows on the horizon”) sets up the comic release of the second one (“Because I was high all the time. I smoked too much pot”).

It’s the kind of line that doesn’t make it out of the writers’ room on network shows, where tradition has long held that sitcom folks sit in a room all day, unfurling obscenities in order to arrive at the compromised line that gets to the stage. It’s why a writer’s assistant on “Friends” sued for sexual harassment but didn’t win, the California Supreme Court affirming last April that writers’ room vulgarity was reasonable on a show in which “explicit sexual references typically were replaced with innuendos, imagery, similes, allusions, puns, or metaphors in order to convey sexual themes in a form suitable for broadcast on network television.”

No such shell game is needed on “Louie,” which is free to swear and abuse this privilege but is actually pretty judicious (when Louie refers to his wife’s privates, the actual word is less funny than its metaphor as “a chamber of financial ruin”). In the pilot, Kim catches Louie masturbating, which leads to a renewed commitment to have sex, which leads to Louie discovering Kim wants to get pregnant again.

“Do you know how much we have in checking? Negative $50,” Louie tells her about the risks of bearing another child. “We have to raise $50 just to be broke.”

More than the raunch -- which keeps migrating to broadcast, anyway -- this is what makes “Lucky Louie” interesting. It dares to utter that eight-letter word: “checking.”

“Tourgasm” takes place in an America we don’t see, either, but this is because we’re locked inside a bus with four guys mugging at a hand-held camera. It’s “Entourage” on the cheap, without the fun stuff -- Ari’s showy rants or Drama’s neediness -- and with even less at stake.

The comics that make up Dane Cook’s touring posse -- Jay Davis, Gary Gulman and Robert Kelly -- convey the same airborne sense of sponging off of a star that Vince’s buds exude. Off the bus, they play with toys; on the bus, they sleep, fart and discuss porn. Here’s what HBO hates to hear: It’s been done before, and funnier, on Comedy Central’s “Comedians of Comedy,” for one.

Cook is very likable, very high energy, and he has all the well-minted comic’s moves down pat -- the sound effects, the jumping about, the patter. It’s as a persona that he stands out -- the rock-star following, the comic as Smashing Pumpkin.

But the world at large doesn’t tax him; finally, in Episode 3, I saw him crack a USA Today (the Life section). No wonder: His material (not that you see much of it) is about things like car crashes and fast-food drive-thrus and how there’s always that one friend in a group that nobody else likes.

On “Tourgasm,” Cook is working the college circuit, where a comedian might chance to discuss the war in Iraq. But he’s an embodiment of the depressing axiom among comics that nothing bums out an audience faster than politics (except for comics like Lewis Black, whose newest HBO special, premiering Saturday, is called “Red, White & Screwed”).

Funny, this aversion to the world outside his bus, because Cook is at least partly a politician, shaking each and every hand and signing each and every bra and responding to each and every instant message from fans, having blazed a trail for himself with his hit website.

“Tourgasm” is about two things,” he tells the camera, in a moment of reflection after the show at Sonoma State. “It’s about comedy and our love for comedy and our passion for getting up and entertaining

His legion all know the back story behind his hand signal, the Su-Fi. It’s all kind of Scientology-seeming on the one hand, but ingenious and adaptive on the other: The jokester as your Friendster.

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‘Lewis Black’

Where: HBO

When: 10 to 11 p.m. Saturday

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)

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‘Entourage’

Where: HBO

When: 10 to 10:30 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)

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‘Lucky Louie’

Where: HBO

When: 10:30 to 11 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)

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‘Dane Cook’s Tourgasm’

Where: HBO

When: 11 to 11:30 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)