Dane Cook
Dane Cook
Dane Jeffrey Cookis an American stand-up comedian and film actor. He has released five comedy albums: Harmful If Swallowed; Retaliation; Vicious Circle; Rough Around The Edges: Live From Madison Square Garden; and Isolated Incident. In 2006, Retaliation became the highest charting comedy album in 28 years and went platinum. He performed an HBO special in the Fall of 2006, Vicious Circle, a straight-to-DVD special titled Rough Around The Edges, and a Comedy Central special in 2009 titled Isolated Incident. He...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth18 March 1972
CityCambridge, MA
CountryUnited States of America
Comedy is immediate. Comedy is a solo mission. You're all by yourself, up there. And when you're in a film, on a set, it's a collaborative effort. It's about me being a tool for somebody else to create a story and a character from nothing, from their imagination.
I was not a silly kid or outgoing. In fact, I suffered from quite a bit of anxiety. I used to have panic attacks when I was a teenager, really incapacitating moments, because I had some phobias.
Losing my mind sounds so pessimistic. I prefer the term winning my insanity.
Here's how you know that you're really drunk: when you get into a taxi cab and you think the fare is the time.
I have to say I'm a massive fan of yours
I never wanted to be pigeonholed as one style of comedy. I want to be the kind of person you have a random back-and-forth with at a party. So that if you go to my show I could take irreverent, I could take subtle, I could take slapstick - pretty much anything I could think of that would be entertaining - and my audience would be with me.
When Napster first hit, I had a Web site at the time, so I said, 'I'm going to take 20 clips from my first CD and I'll put them under comedy and jokes, and see what happens,'
I had the humble beginnings. I was doing comedy in laundry mats in 1992, literally where I would bring a little gorilla amp and a lapel mike and just start performing.
My mother had a lot of phobias. She's pregnant with me and she was a very phobic person. So I was born into phobia, basically.
I'm completely ecstatic when a woman has own back story and brings something to the table and has a real strong kind of independence.
I'm interested in doing everything and anything that I can to squeeze that creativity out of my brain. I guess I'm sort of a performance rat.
As a comedian, I am obligated to tell you the truth, my truth. To share with you my beliefs, my perspective. And I think that we forget sometimes that that's the oath that comics take, that we will go up and share everything - the irreverent, the scary.
I think there's a definite template for what can be done for the future, but I'm not going to call myself a trailblazer. It didn't seem like a big idea to me: Let people know you appreciate their loyalty, and you say thank you. I was just doing what those punk bands did with fliers. Stand on the corner and say 'Come check us out.' Instead of fliers, it was going to be instant messages and e-mails.