It was just a few years ago, back before Dane Cook became one of maybe ten comics in history to consistently pack stadiums, before his second album, Retaliation, debuted this past August at No. 4 on the Billboard charts—the first time a comedy album has dented the top ten since the Steve Martin's A Wild and Crazy Guy in 1979—and before his agent was fielding requests from studios for him to take the kind of roles, as Cook puts it, "that were just passed up by guys with last names like Sandler and Carey." Back when he was just one of the funny many, Cook had to beg Saturday Night Live creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels to hear his set.
The problem was that Michaels had flown to Los Angeles and come to the famed Laugh Factory to find a new black cast member for SNL. Cook, being white, didn't qualify. But Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada, who knew that Cook had spent his life dreaming about SNL, added his name to the bill anyway. There were four other headliners, and their sets ran long. By the time Cook was ready to step onstage, Michaels, along with half the audience, was heading for the door.
"I made a decision," says Cook about that night. "I decided to play a character: the desperate-don't-go-comic-guy. I ran onto the stage and ran right into the audience. I was walking on tables screaming: DON'T LEAVE! YOU'RE WALKING OUT ON MY DREAMS! YOU'RE WALKING OUT ON MY DESTINY! HOW COULD YOU LEAVE? THIS IS MY MOMENT TO SHINE! YOU WILL SIT DOWN! YOU WILL SIT BACK DOWN!"
This was not the usual fare. Michaels sat back down. After Cook finished his set, Michaels pulled Masada aside and told him he'd never seen anything like that before—and while he didn't hire him, he did bring him out for an audition later. "It wasn't just that Cook killed," says Masada. "It was that he killed with totally improvised material. I've been in this business 27 years. When a guy like Lorne is around, comics always do their old, proven stuff. That night, everything Dane did was made up on the spot. No one does that. I mean no one."
"The spontaneity is the thing," says Cook, sitting at a table in Greenblatt's Deli, conveniently located directly beside the Laugh Factory, on the edge of Sunset Strip. "When I see a band, I want to feel like the show's for me. I don't want a set list. I try to bring that to comedy. It doesn't always work perfectly, but when it does, it's the best feeling ever." The so-called Dane Train—his multi-hundred-thousand insanely devoted following—shares the feeling, and Hollywood has taken note. He had a small part in last year’s Waiting and another that will be out soon in London, and has just begun preproduction on Employee of the Month, costarring Jessica Simpson. There's also a Sony-backed sitcom called Cooked that's currently searching for a network, and about fifteen feature roles for him to choose from.
The 33-year-old comic, who stands just shy of six feet with spiky black hair and bright teeth, has a penchant for ball caps and rock and roll t-shirts that make him look a bit like a frat boy lost in a hipster's closet. Despite the look, he is all business. Doesn't order food, doesn't even touch his water glass, but he's more than happy to talk about his comedy. "If I had to describe my work in one word," he says, "it would be random. I want to be the iPod Shuffle of comedy."
His playlist has been updated from his early days of rabid physicality that included monster impersonations and car alarm sing-alongs and much jumping, falling, and screaming. Things have calmed since then into a kind of peripatetic observational humor that’s simultaneously stoner and cerebral and ranges topically from the desire to shoot guys in Superman T-shirts in the chest just to prove them wrong to his desire to be abducted by aliens, with a few thousand tangents in between. But Cook's trademark is his ability to connect with the audience. "It's a rare talent," says fellow comic Jon Lovitz. "Dane's got so much energy you think he could blow up at any moment, but his show always comes across as an intimate conversation. It doesn't matter if he's playing to 50 or 5000 people."
This is not accidental. "I was doing this show in Boston around 1994,” says Cook, “and this guy came up to me afterwards and said, 'Thank you, your comedy means a lot to me, my brother passed away in a car accident a month ago and the things that you’re saying were things we used to laugh at,' and he threw a hug on me—not like a guy hug, like a real hug. This guy ended up coming back to shows and I’d see him and it made me realize I could stay in people’s lives." Which sounds like a homicide-inducing platitude until you hear the stories about Cook standing outside clubs in Rhode Island and New York City in the middle of winter, wearing only a T-shirt and spending over three hours signing autographs and posing for photographs. Or until you see the thousands of photographs at his myspace page (myspace.com/danecook) that people have sent in of themselves flashing his Su-Fi sign. Su-Fi is short for “super-finger,” Cook's attempt to improve on the standard bird flip, done instead with the third and fourth fingers extended, which has become enough of a thing that he's posted photos of everyone from soldiers stationed in Iraq throwing the double-digit tribute to naked girls flashing Su-Fi with their bodies covered in Cook quotes.
The friend counter on Cook’s myspace page numbers the Dane Train at close to 700,000, which explains how Retaliation sold 90,000 units in its first week and then went platinum. Cooked earned those fans one at a time. He spent his teenage years in Arlington, Massachusetts, poring over old comedy albums, perfecting everything he encountered: Carson's wit and Cosby's rambles and Bruce's blues. As soon as he was old enough to work the clubs, he worked them every chance he got, first in Boston, then New York, and then L.A. He can't recall ever taking a night off in fifteen years.
The relentless touring earned him a certain amount of recognition, but Cook multiplied it exponentially when he made a crucial decision in 1990. Against the advice of everyone he knew, he took $25,000—all the money he had in the world—and became the first comic with a strong Web presence. He posted his email address, and still answers just about every note sent his way. "It's all I did: wake up and be at my computer, get something to eat, go back to my computer, play a gig at a club, go home to my computer. But I knew, even back in 2000 when the website first went up, that it was going to lead to the biggest following ever."
It may not yet be the biggest ever, but Cook’s following is why he was asked to host Saturday Night Live in November. The highlight of the show was an amazing and completely blind (he had a turtleneck sweater pulled up over his head) pratfall into a breakaway table that failed to break, so Cook—still completely blind—popped back up and launched himself at it again. While Cook was killing it on SNL, comedians watching the show backstage at the Laugh Factory were cheering. "Comics are really competitive,” says Masada, who was there. “Many of them don't much like each other. That they were high-fiving each other over his success tells you a lot about the respect Dane's managed to earn. I have never seen anything like that." True to form, the first thing Cook did after the show was go on his website and post a sappy thank-you note to his fans.