Atop a featherweight beat on 'Best Friend', Kelly acts out a nightmare scenario where all he can do is worry about his wife's fidelity and bitch about toilet paper while holed up in prison due to some vague crime. Kells fares better when he attempts to conflate his 'Closet'-style soap opera mastery with his still-peerless way with an r&b hook.

To wit, 'Sex Planet', with its middle school Uranus-isms, is a tad amateur night. In a sense, it seems more apropos to judge Double Up as a comedy record than as a pop record. Instead of going up against the likes of Dave Chappelle ('Piss on U') and 'Weird Al' Yankovic ('Trapped in the Drive Thru'), Kells attempts to join them- and top them. Now, five years after he was first arrested on those infamous charges and with no trial date in sight, Double Up aims for the funny bone. Kelly started to embrace his flightier fancies with force. Then people started to forget about that tape and R. But 21 counts of child pornography derailed his ribald candor in 2002, resulting in the spiritually minded Chocolate Factory (2003) and Happy People/U Saved Me (2004). Years before 'Trapped in the Closet' cast its spell, he was yodeling randomly on 'Get Up on a Room' and puncturing Pavarotti with 'The Opera', both off of 1998's R. Hardly a stranger to absurdity, Kells has been studying the art of crazed hilarity for more than a decade. 'The Zoo' is only one of several out-and-out joke tracks on the controversial star's ninth LP, Double Up, which puts his stand-up routine to the fore against next-level metaphorical ridiculousness like 'Sweet Tooth', the jeep-sexing 'Ignition (Remix)' seems Ben Stein-straight. 'There's such a thing as a sexasaurus,' deadpans Kelly. Kelly t-shirt himself.) After singing the lines, 'I gotcha so wet, it's like a rainforest/ Like Jurassic Park except I'm your sexasaurus baby,' in the middle of an a cappella version of new song 'The Zoo', he's greeted with a mix of incredulous screams and laughs. Kelly apparel into the cheap seats with a t-shirt bazooka. On an extended version of 'In the Kitchen', Kells dry humps an imaginary cooking buddy with the vigor of five Emerils before bringing out a chubby dude with an Abe Lincoln beard and sleeve tats to launch some R.

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