On Sunday night, Comedy Central will air Dane Cook's new stand-up special, ISolated INcident, which will be released as an audio album Tuesday and as a DVD later this year. 

There's no way around it - if you're not a Dane Cook fan, chances are you really, really hate him. If that's the case, it's time to gather the rabble-rousers and pitchforks, because his new stand-up special is about to be unavoidable - especially if you're a fan of Comedy Central. But there's a catch for all the haters out there - the performance actually kinda kicks ass.

Sure, the guy's under enough public scrutiny to make the Octo-mom jealous, and he's been relegated to Carlos Mencia's zone of respectability by millions. Nevertheless, Cook's self-made domination in the comedy scene is indisputable - just look at the numbers. He's the highest-charting comedian in three decades, with multi-platinum, chart-topping albums. He gets a half-million hits per month on his website, has just as many Twitter followers and he's got 2.5 million friends on his MySpace page. He's got the internet market cornered in a way no other comic has ever come within screaming range of, which is precisely why most of his peers can't stand him either.

"He built his career leveraging MySpace, but he now has 500,000 Facebook fans, and that's gone up 200,000 in recent weeks," said Adam Zbar, chief executive of Zannel, which partnered with Cook on his own iPhone application. Yep, he's got one of those too. "He's is the digital-age comedian with the largest online footprint of anyone in comedy."

Despite his ascension to disputed fame, the past few years have been particularly difficult for Dane, who lost his mother in 2006 after her battle with cancer and then his father the following year. To make matters worse, his half-brother was caught up in a massive embezzlement scandal, charged with siphoning off millions from the comedian's earnings. The events have certainly affected the man who's been known for his Carrey-esque physical antics and expressiveness onstage.

Recorded in front of less than 30 people at The Laugh Factory in Hollywood, Cook pounces through an array of timely set-ups, including an opening joke about Obama making white people feel that they can make racial slurs. You'll recognize the style and comedic pacing, but the off-stage trauma and backlash to his obnoxiously rising star over the past few years has caused the comic to trim the fat and water down the schtick, with impressive results. The shouting of old is largely replaced with the calculated strength of delivery on the new material - some personal, some political and lots of it graphically sexual. 

ISolated INcident will be called a move of cold calculation, attempting to show that Dane can conquer a room where the sheer size of the audience doesn't dwarf the material. And maybe they're right. But whatever the angle, one thing is indisputable - this CD is hilarious. The most poignant bit of the entire show is the joke about calling his mother's cell phone - months after she'd died. It wasn't a matter of a comedian pillaging whatever he can for laughs - there was a genuine relatable humanity behind the joke."I've been doing this material about deleting my mom from the cellphone," Cook said. "That moment when I was looking at the number and just as her son and a human being, what it meant that this person was gone and the number was still here. The second thing is the comic mind going, everyone goes through this - a little dual push and pull. So I told it on stage one night, just really authentically and without too much polish. It felt right."

That process found Cook dropping in unexpectedly at comedy clubs like the Laugh Factory, testing his material to surprised audiences of 20 to 30 people. Now that he's honed it to a fine point, he's going bigger than big with it once more, playing venues normally reserved for rock stars and pro-sports teams. But hell, name one other comedian alive today who sold out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row. 

INcident was ISolated INcident premieres on Comedy Central on Sunday, but don't assume Dane will be tuning in from the couch, wallowing in the televised glory. That very night he'll be playing the sold-out Pepsi Center in Denver, to 20,000 of his closest friends. 

CraveOnline Rating: 7.5 out of 10