Once a young superstar playing arenas, Cook is happy to have graduated to comedy elder. “The great thing about being the old bull, you don’t get accused of being maybe as braggadocious,” says Cook, who grew up in Arlington. But he’d still like to restate the case for his accomplishments in stand-up. His 2005 album “Retaliation” went double platinum. He sold out some of the biggest venues in the country. His 2009 “ISolated INcident” special was filmed in one complete, uncut shot. He wants to show he can be a force again.
“We changed the landscape of stand-up, my company, with the comedy album,” he says. “We changed the landscape of touring with my touring company. We changed the landscape of [how] arena comedy used to be looked upon by the community, and how that was filmed and presented. I feel like we’re at another place with this [upcoming] special that is going to set the bar in terms of what you should see surrounding a comedian’s performance.”
The way Cook sees it, stand-up comedy has gone from one of the most dynamic things on television to one of the most boring. Stand-up specials are ubiquitous now, and some of them feel very slapped together. Though he is tight-lipped on the details about the finished product, which does not yet have a title, he does say he has worked with a director to develop the particulars about everything from the type of cameras used to the approach in filming the audience. The idea is to move the idea of a special forward, in keeping with how people consume media now.
“It’s not enough to just have the funny person standing on the stage,” he says. “Generationally, the way people are watching things on the go, it has to have a bit more zip. I know that when people see this special, they’re going to say, ‘Oh, OK, I didn’t know that you could do that.’”
In terms of subject matter, Cook says that he is getting more personal, trying to more thoroughly merge his onstage and offstage personae. Some of the material he’ll be presenting in Boston is about the roller coaster ride of his career, including his experiences with anxiety and self-loathing. One bit in particular is about a stalker — Cook says he’s had more than one — he dealt with after he got famous. “I’m sharing this [expletive] epic, unbelievable story of what it was like to deal with somebody who’s threatening to find you and kill you, pretty much on a daily basis,” he says. “And then what happens when that person does find you.”
It may surprise some fans to hear Cook, an energetic performer who can play to the cheap seats in a stadium, label himself as an introvert. That was, he says, part of the tension in his initial desire to be onstage, which was exacerbated by fame. “Being an introvert,” he says, “wanting to be this performer like this whole early part of my life, and then to finally get to a place where people have access to you, when you used to be a person that, I felt like nobody wants access to me. Who loves me? Who cares?”
There was a time when it was impossible to have a neutral opinion of Dane Cook. To his critics, he not only wasn’t funny, he was destroying comedy. To his diehard fans, he was royalty who could do no wrong. That debate isn’t nearly as hot as it was at the peak of Cook’s popularity, but he says he still has his share of “haters.” Now, he sees them as necessary.
“It’s a must,” he says. “You must be polarizing in some way, shape, or form. Otherwise, you’re milquetoast, and if you’re milquetoast, that’s like the song of summer. You’ll be a toe-tapper for a minute. But you have to have strong opinions, you have to do something to keep one side really fiercely defending and the other side curiously nagging and kind of prodding.”
In “Troublemaker,” his 2014 special, Cook joked about how even he had an anonymous social media profile designed specifically for trolling. But since he started to see himself as a…
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