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HOLLYWOOD – On a Sunset Strip balcony, sitting beside an azure pool, Dane Cook makes the confession that America has been waiting for during his two decades as a comic.
“Can I just admit to you, you’re right,” the 37-year-old said, holding his palms to the sky. “Look, … I’m not funny. I’m OK with that. I’m cool with that.”
Cook is, of course, joking about his lack of humor, which is kind of funny. This is the sort of paradox that swirls around the wildly successful touring comic who, more than anyone else on the comedy scene today, can polarize a cocktail party conversation.
Cook’s new Comedy Central stand-up special, “ISolated INcident,” was released Tuesday as an audio album and DVD set. Cook is on tour now, with regional tour stops June 12 in Auburn Hills, Mich., and June 14 in Chicago.
With half-a-million hits per month on his Web site, a popular blog and 2.5 million friends on his MySpace page, Cook is hard-wired for the digital age.
“He built his career leveraging MySpace, but he now has 300,000 Twitter fans and 500,000 Facebook fans, and that’s gone up 200,000 in recent weeks,” said Adam Zbar, executive of Zannel, which partnered with Cook on his own iPhone application. “He’s the digital-age comedian with the largest online footprint of anyone in comedy.”
That’s a major reason he sells out arenas with startling ease and racks up box-office numbers that are more like Bruce Springsteen than Lenny Bruce; in 2005, for example, he played two shows at Boston Garden, in his hometown, with a combined audience of 38,000.
“I’ve embraced this technology; it’s the thing that built my career, but it’s also going to be the thing that capsizes me every once in a while,” said Cook, attacked with venom and glee across the Internet as unfunny, a joke thief and a star only frat boys could love. “I respond directly to some of it, or I have in the past, but if you do that, well, that’s one day a week you have to set aside, a B.S. day.”
In some ways, Cook’s success is a bit like the 1980s music career of Phil Collins – the more you pull it apart, the harder it is to explain. There’s nothing especially mysterious about Cook, but many of his comedy peers are mystified by him.
Veteran comic Robert Klein summed up the skeptics’ side a few years ago when he said, “With Dane Cook, I just don’t see it. I’m going, ‘Where’s the beef here?’ I just don’t get it. He made a career for himself on the Internet.”
Cook’s comedy is observational, antic and smirking. Many comedians are outsiders, either by heritage or disposition, and there’s anger or iconoclasm in the best of their jokes. Not Cook, who is white, handsome, tall and cheery. This might explain why he is so popular – and so ridiculed.
“People want to escape, they want to laugh, and a lot of the stuff that’s there right now – ‘The Daily Show,’ Letterman and Stephen Colbert – it’s still got a lot of the stuff that’s stressing us. The pinprick and the healing is great, but sometimes people want to set all of it aside and just be entertained.”
Cook starred in a romantic comedy called “Good Luck Chuck” that was neither good nor lucky, and while he held his own as a wannabe serial killer in “Mr. Brooks” (with Oscar winners Kevin Costner and William Hurt), the movie earned more respect than money. Cook has decided to go back to the stage, where he has been telling jokes since he was 17 in Boston.
“I think for the first time in a long time I have perspective about what I’ve accomplished and where I’ve, well, I don’t want to say where I failed, but where I had some bad at-bats,” Cook said. “I didn’t have that while it was happening.”
