When the Weekly spoke with Dane Cook a couple of years ago, we predicted he was going to be stand-up comedy's next big thing. When his second CD, Retaliation, debuted on the Billboard charts at No. 4—the highest for a comedy album since Steve Martin's A Wild and Crazy Guy in 1989—it clearly proved our prognostic abilities. Oh, and we guess it means Cook really is funny. But what we never foresaw was him planting his lips on Charlize Theron's behind on the Tonight Show in early October.
When asked who was next on his ass-kissing list, Cook was stuck with how to top the sexy Oscar winner but did say, "She smelled like Fruit Loops; I don't know why."
As a further sign that the boy from Boston has made it, there's now a Dane Cook soundboard online (
www.stupidnakedpeople.com/dane_cook.php)—a site with a number of sound clips available at the click of a mouse and perfect for stringing together into prank phone calls. Cook, who has one of the more sophisticated websites out there, especially for a guy who tells jokes for a living, was duly impressed.
"In the world of TV, if you do the Tonight Show or something like that, it's a big deal. In the world of the Internet, if somebody makes a soundboard, it's huge."
In the world of movies, Cook is also making inroads, recently appearing in Waiting ... as Floyd, a butter-fingered cook. Which raises the question, is it possible to be a successful stand-up comedian these days without having your own TV show?
"I never felt, for me, that that was the path. I did stand-up with the intention of building a stand-up base from stand-up, and as much as I admired guys like Seinfeld, I was hoping to carve out that core audience strictly through the touring and the word-of-mouth and the website and whatever it was. I'm sure just exposure-wise, yes, it's a great tool. It's a commercial every week for a comic. I guess I'm an exception to that rule."
A better tool, says Cook, is the Internet, relating how he had just seen a kid from Canada at Hollywood's Laugh Factory who packed the place thanks to a clip of his stand-up being circulated online. "You don't know him, I don't know him, but he's making millions of dollars and doing what he loves in front of his fans."