[Editor's Note: It is April 1, so all of the following could turn out to be untrue. Carry on!]Comedian Dane Cook has been voted the "unfunniest" comic by a Boston radio poll modeled after the NCAA's March Madness brackets.Cook "won" over comedy punching bags like Paula Poundstone, Sinbad, Jeff Foxworthy and Carlos Mencia. The poll, which aired on WBCN's Toucher & Rich Show, is obviously not science. But was there any truth to the results? Cook is a wildly popular performer whose albums have cracked the Billboard Top 10 — a rarity for a comedy album. His rabid online audience floods both his website and MySpace page. Critics say he steals jokes. And his movie career (Employee of the Month, Good Luck Chuck) — well, it hasn't exactly set the world on fire.Nevertheless, I have to confess a weakness for his Car Alarm and Nothing Fights routines (warning: clips do contain a few naughty words), but I get why he can annoy.What do you think? Does Cook deserve so much derision? ...
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According to the New York Post, the former heard that the latter was going to try to break his record for the most consecutive hours spent performing stand-up, so on Sunday, he broke his own damn record by doing a six-hour-and-12-minute set at Hollywood's Laugh Factory. Among his jokes, the paper says, was an explanation of a recent trip to Ecuador: He had to go so he could return to the States speaking the language properly. — Ben Katner
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Forget my crack about the slashed Metamucil budget. Per Variety, Jim Broadbent will play a Yale professor in the fourth Indiana Jones film, which Steven Spielberg began lensing Monday in New Mexico, but will also shoot in, among other global sites, New Haven, Connecticut.... Kate Hudson will star opposite Dane Cook in Bachelor No. 2, a rom-com about a man hired to take other men's exes out on horrific dates, thus sending them back to their former fellas.... HBO Films is adapting the British play My Zinc Bed, with Uma Thurman, Jonathan Pryce and Paddy Considine all on board.... DreamWorks and Universal are turning the graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens into a live-action feature.
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CNN is planning to cancel the low-rated Paula Zahn Now, says Variety, perhaps filling the 8 pm time slot with a news program anchored by NBC's Campbell Brown, if a deal can be worked out.... The 41st Annual Country Music Association Awards will air Nov. 7 on ABC.... DVD release dates have been set for Taxi Driver: Limited Collector's Edition (Aug. 14) and Dane Cook: The Lost Pilots (featuring two never-aired comedy pilots starring you-know-who, Aug. 21).
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Dane Cook is looking likely to land the lead in Bachelor No. 2, about a creep who gets paid to take girls out on dates that are so bad, they go running back to their exes.... David E. Kelley has scored frequent collaborator Thomas Schlamme (The West Wing) to direct the pilot for his ABC drama, Life on Mars.... Deadwood's John Hawkes has been cast as the brother of a baseball great turned substitute PE teacher in the Will Ferrell-produced HBO pilot East Bound and Down.
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