Photograph courtesy Dane Cook
There’s been a lot of talk lately about “punching down” in comedy. While comedian Dane Cook does sometimes dabble in controversial content, he’s never been accused of taking cheap shots. He’s been around long enough, though, to have formed some opinions about comedy and comedy theory.
“I think that anything goes in stand-up comedy,” he says in a telephone interview ahead of his October 25 show at Hard Rock Casino. “Part of stand-up is the pin prick and the release of how everyone is feeling. Sometimes, what they’re feeling might be uncouth, but the reality is everyone is laughing at this one thing because we’re sort of feeling the same thing. That doesn’t mean it’s right. Sometimes we’re laughing at the most wrong thing possible.”
Cook, though, know there are limits in comedy. “If you don’t feel malice from a comedian, all topics are in play,” he says, noting that he’s seen performers with malicious intent end their careers prematurely. “You don’t get laughs when audiences start sensing that meanness.”
Early on in his stand-up career, he learned how he could “let the ship leave the shore,” as he puts it. Even if his jokes went pretty far, he says, “I’d still have old ladies pinching my cheek after the show. And I’d say some pretty wild stuff, especially in my New York years, where I was like, Let me see how far I can really go.”
Born and raised in suburban Boston, Cook, 53, developed an interest in comedy and performing at a young age. He was mesmerized by people who could be funny but could also move others emotionally. His earliest influences were Robin Williams and Steve Martin, whom he admired for allowing themselves to be vulnerable and emotional as storytellers. To Cook, laughter is the best release. “It’s the most powerful of all the emotions,” he says, “and yet I do find myself drawn to material that’s darker and more complex when I have the opportunity to do so.”
Even before he did his first open mic, Cook had a good idea of how he wanted to approach stand-up comedy. “I had this epiphany early on that I liked comics and performers who were brash,” he says, but trying to figure out what would make a room full of strangers laugh seemed like an impossible task. “I don’t know what’s going to make you laugh until we’re laughing. So I loved this idea of going up on stage and expressing myself in foolish, absurd, and irreverent ways.”
Cook soon realized he was definitely a storyteller and not a set-up, punchline comic. “It’s not my strong suit,” he says of the latter, “because I have this physical element.” A more traditionally written joke will occasionally find its way into his set, though. “I just happened to say something on stage a few months ago that you might say is a vintage set-up with a punchline. I didn’t write it ahead of time, it just happened on stage. It was just Click, click, boom, set-up, punchline, and I loved it. Maybe there’s more of that to come.”
Though Cook considers himself a storyteller, it was one of America’s great joke tellers who wound up being the biggest influence on him. Indeed, watching Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show taught him that a comedian didn’t have to be just one kind of funny. “He’d have a terrible moment in his monologue, and you’d be talking about that the next day and not the great jokes he landed,” Cook recalls, “like when the cue cards fell on the floor and he didn’t know what to do. Whatever something like that occurs, I’m present and real.”
The second lesson he learned from Carson came by way of an interview the talk show host gave in 1965 shortly after taking over The Tonight Show from Jack Paar. “I’m paraphrasing,” Cook relates, “but essentially he said, If you’re truly a performer, you use everything—your trauma, the impression you did when you were 8 that made your aunt laugh, the one and only dance move you learned from a girl in high school.” That’s stuck with Cook to this day. “I can be scary, silly, foolish, anything I want on stage, but I have to be real. And those two things from Johnny keep me afloat. I wake up every day and say, I’m excited to try something new.”
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