Jack and Coke

Album Review

For those keeping score at home: Artie Lange recorded Jack and Coke, his first comedy album, at Gotham’s in New York City in the summer of 2009…which is between his relapse at the beginning of the year and before his debilitating bout with depression in the fall, one that led him to cancel his year-end concerts on the West Coast (thereby provoking the wrath of Eric the Midget, but that’s a subject for another forum, preferably one run by Mutt). In other words, when Artie recorded Jack and Coke he was clean, sober, and engaged, injecting some energy into his standard set. And the material here is indeed fairly familiar to anybody who has read Too Fat to Fish or listened regularly to the Howard Stern Show — making sure a hooker keeps clapping whenever she’s out of eyesight, meeting up with Norm MacDonald to watch Bob Uecker do play by play, Chris Rock’s dead-on deconstruction of the Stern show, Artie’s spot-on Mike Tyson, many throwaway jokes about Benjy Bronk. Those Benjy jokes will fly over the head of anybody who isn’t a Stern superfan — and even those listeners may be hard-pressed to recognize a tweaked Rev. Bob Levy on the album cover, his face appearing under “Coke,” representing his favorite vice, just like “Jack” is Artie’s drug of choice — and there are times where Jack and Coke seems entirely the province of those who already get the joke, filled with in-jokes and enough callbacks to satisfy Greg Fitzsimmons, still smarting from washing his kid’s mouth out with soap. And if to that audience — the kind that thrills to Doug Goodstein listed as Executive Producer and Scott DePace as director, the kind who this indeed is targeted to — it’s initially a bit of a disappointment to have so much of Jack and Coke cover familiar ground, remember that at some point — not too long, actually — Artie will retire this material, just like he retired his Bon Scott impression, so it’s great that we have such a strong documentation of his set., Rovi