The Humbling of Dane Cook

September 22, 2020 8:49 PM

“It’s unreal how quickly the media goes from being a lap dog to an alley cat,” he wrote on July 23rd. “True beauty comes from within but you can’t just show up with dried clumps of shit in your hair either,” he added a week earlier.
posted by Francies (55 comments total)

I don't know if he was or wasn't a joke stealer.
I do know no Dane Cook joke ever made me laugh half as hard as the line in Archer where Archer calls Karate the Dane Cook of martial arts.
posted by BrotherCaine at 8:59 PM on September 22, 2020 [36 favorites]

I read the first couple paragraphs and now think I should bill Dane Cook for my time, not least because he's made more money than most people ever will being shittier than most people will ever be.

Fuck Dane Cook. I'm positive he will run for office at some point (probably has, I'm not keeping score), and all I ask is that if there's any vestige left of human decency, we can at least collectively reject Dane Cook.


(He's going to be the next president, isn't he. Fuck everything.)
posted by aspersioncast at 9:18 PM on September 22, 2020 [6 favorites]

Uh, maybe read the entire article? It actually turns out that he's pretty harmless, not perfect, but didn't turn into some kind of alt-right shithead, which was probably possible given who a lot of his fanbase were.
posted by axiom at 9:43 PM on September 22, 2020 [27 favorites]

Have heard a bunch of his stuff on the streaming. Always felt borderline at best. funny, but, what...? Hope he grows up. Maybe should RTFA...
posted by Windopaene at 10:20 PM on September 22, 2020

Interwebs thinks his net worth is circa $35 million. The article makes our like 100 likes on Twitter is humbling. The dude is 48 and living an unchallenging retired life.
posted by rh at 10:35 PM on September 22, 2020 [8 favorites]

Who?
posted by CCBC at 10:52 PM on September 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Dane Cook. He's the karate of mid-2000s comedians, basically.
posted by axiom at 10:57 PM on September 22, 2020 [34 favorites]

Dane Cook was (to me) inexplicably basically everywhere for a few years. I probably watched one of his specials at a gathering once, but it didn't really stick. And then he disappeared and I literally hadn't thought about him until today when this post appeared.

It's good that he's realized he should just retreat. He has enough to live on. If I had his money I'd do the same thing, even without having to be a bro comedian.
posted by hippybear at 11:00 PM on September 22, 2020 [10 favorites]

I have vague memories of his style being fairly densely-packed in a jokes-per-sentence way but I can’t recall a single joke. There was a bit that was sort of “observational humor” about like cheating on his girlfriend or something, but I basically remember like part of a sentence out of the middle of it. I don’t have any desire to look it up.

I do remember a chunk of years of comedians using his name as a punchline or talking about how awful he is, but I could never tell for sure if they were sour-graping.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 11:04 PM on September 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

He also stood in the center of Madison Square Garden and did a set full of really exaggerated Bono-like poses as a part of his set, if I recall what I watched.

Like, I am a Bono fan (I know he's not that popular generally here, but no derail), and his poses work pretty well with his music. I found Cook's physical presentation, obviously designed to try to communicate with a giant arena in a way beyond standing behind a microphone, to be really peculiar. Especially viewed through cameras and not live.
posted by hippybear at 11:11 PM on September 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

I feel like he was a pretty generic standup who got by on a certain sort of energy onstage - miming silly bits of his bits, SUDDENLY YELLING the punchline and so on.
posted by atoxyl at 11:27 PM on September 22, 2020 [8 favorites]

Is there one of those online games where you try to go for as long as you can without ever hearing of Dane Cook? Because if there is, I just lost. Thanks MetaFilter!
posted by chavenet at 3:30 AM on September 23, 2020 [14 favorites]

I'll say it - I am somewhat pleasantly surprised that he managed to gracefully fade into obscurity instead of going the republican grievance grifter route. He did, at one point, seem sufficiently desperate for attention to me to make that seem like a real temptation, but he apparently has evolved in that regard.
posted by sohalt at 3:35 AM on September 23, 2020 [9 favorites]

I liked the article a lot. I feel it's mainly about growing up, as much for the author as Dane Cook, and not really that much about his career. If I were asked to provide my favourite two quotes from it, they'd be this characterisation of his humour:

This was always the comic’s most fruitful demographic: teen boy gamers, who wanted to hear their cafeteria humor polished and workshopped by a professional.

The whole couple of paragraphs that belongs in are very much “I came to bury Cook, not to praise him”.

But I like this ending too:

But as far as I’m concerned, we need more people to realize when their time is up, and understand that the heights of their career are best ensconced to the era that birthed it. Cook will let the 2005 version of himself thrive in its rightful context forever, while his 2020 incarnation chills in Hawaii with a whole lot of money and no more wars to win

It's a happy ever after of sorts. It glosses over the fact that he was a fairly shitty comedian, but I think it's good to hear that it's OK for people to leave the limelight and get on with their life.
posted by ambrosen at 3:36 AM on September 23, 2020 [14 favorites]

Dane Cook calling time does really seem to be the best outcome for all concerned.

I don't know if mid-2000s me would have accepted that Dane Cook would end up having the moral high ground on Louis CK, but honestly there's a pretty big list of things that mid-2000s me would have found more surprising.

I hope Dane Cook invests his money wisely and takes up some engaging hobbies.
posted by Merus at 4:16 AM on September 23, 2020 [13 favorites]

Never got into his act at all, pretty much loathe the sort of bro humor that he represents... but he's still leagues better than the likes of Louis C.K. and Garrison Keillor, two formerly respected guys who turned out to be abusive creeps and who are still out there doing shows because there are apparently still people willing to pay to see them despite (or maybe, on some level, because of) their being creeps.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:44 AM on September 23, 2020 [4 favorites]

Are we not going to bring up how he got robbed blind by his half brother/money manager?
posted by lextex at 5:58 AM on September 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is the the second article from Mel Magazine I've read via the blue. The first one explained why a Black woman comedian enjoying a moment of fame wasn't funny. And this one explains why a misogynistic, average white man was, but it's okay that he's not relevant any more. May Mel Magazine find solace in its own irrelevance.
posted by gladly at 6:18 AM on September 23, 2020 [12 favorites]

Dane Cook has always been an asshole, and whatever he talks about w/r/t calling time, he was planning his "comeback" and talking to press about it as recently as last year. Been done with that fucker since he decided it would be cool to make jokes about the Aurora mass shooting like, 4 days after it happened. He can go fuck himself, on his big piles of cash.
posted by lazaruslong at 6:26 AM on September 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

Cook will let the 2005 version of himself thrive in its rightful context forever, while his 2020 incarnation chills in Hawaii with a whole lot of money and no more wars to win

Yo, so who is going to pass this on to Joanne
posted by ominous_paws at 7:17 AM on September 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

Perhaps I'm too old. But I'm plugged into the internet constantly, and have been since 1995.

I've only ever heard of Dane Cook via people referencing how bad Dane Cook is/was. I was vaguely familiar with the way he looked, too. But that's it. To my knowledge, I've never heard his voice! How could this have happened?!?
posted by SoberHighland at 7:27 AM on September 23, 2020 [5 favorites]

So, I am not a fan of this guy and I have not rtfa. BUT, he and Sean Penn put together a Fast Times at Ridgemont High table read for charity that I thought was very charming and enjoyable. Included Sean Penn, Morgan Freeman, Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts, Matthew McConaughey, Brad Pitt, Ray Liotta (Mr. Hand!), John Legend, Jimmy Kimmel, Henry Golden, Shia LaBeouf. I did not watch to the end but apparently Cameron Crow and Amy Heckerling showed up too. You might like it. (No idea if they asked Jennifer Jason Leigh or others from the original)
posted by Glinn at 7:31 AM on September 23, 2020

It isn’t a stretch to say that Cook, for at least a couple of years, was more popular than any standup in American history.

No. That is indeed a stretch.
posted by Splunge at 7:37 AM on September 23, 2020 [8 favorites]

My age and gender and his meteoric rise perfectly intersected. I was a college radio-show host in 2003. I fucking loved Dane Cook and my brother and I would riff on his material back and forth with one another.
I remember his interview with Louis C.K. where they talk about the allegations of "joke theft," and I think C.K. said something like, "you're just the rocket ship that sucks everything up into it and blasts off into space - and sometimes that includes other people's stuff"

I will always remember laughing so hard I cried about his monkey-fucking-a-coconut stuff and transforming into a puke dragon and the bit about seeing a wizard on top of his dad's balls and everything else because I was exactly his target demographic. Loud, overconfident, 21 year old white college male who lived to party and puke off of balconies.

I feel about him the same way I feel about Jurassic Park. I was a ten year old boy obsessed with dinosaurs when that movie came out.

Anyway, I thought he also got deeply fucked over by his brother-as-manager or something and the article didn't really touch on that. And I can imagine that will basically take the wind out of anyone's sails.

I'm not gonna die on the "defending Dane Cook" hill but he was very much a creature of his time. 2001 broke America in a way that we don't fully understand and Dane Cook, I think, was simply reacting to that collective madness.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 8:20 AM on September 23, 2020 [10 favorites]

I always get Dane Cook mixed up with that "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" guy.
posted by sundrop at 9:08 AM on September 23, 2020 [4 favorites]

more popular than any standup in American history

Any comedian who had a tv show named after them is more popular than peak Dane Cook. Anybody who made a more popular movie than Good Luck Chuck, and that's just about anybody who made a movie and isn't Tom Green, is more popular than peak Dane Cook.

Off the top of my head, I think that, at their peak, Kevin Hart, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Bernie Mac, Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne Barr, Garry Shandling, Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Rodney Dangerfield, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor were all bigger than Dane Cook at his peak.

And that's without even mentioning Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Louis C.K., or anybody that hosted a late-night show.

(Now I want to see one of those annualized lists of the best standup comics, like people do for rappers.)
posted by box at 9:09 AM on September 23, 2020 [3 favorites]

Some of the comments here.. I'm seeing parallels to the breathless denunciations of the Rolling Stone Top 500 post.

I mean, Rolling Stone lists.. Dane Cook.. we get it, you're not the target audience. It's the degree of effort in displaying that disdain that, I don't know.. stare at a parody long enough and you become the parody?
posted by elkevelvet at 9:30 AM on September 23, 2020 [11 favorites]

I don't know if he was or wasn't a joke stealer.
I do know no Dane Cook joke ever made me laugh half as hard as the line in Archer where Archer calls Karate the Dane Cook of martial arts.

I'm not sure if Archer started that or not. My friends and I are huge Archer fans, so this may have come from that, or elsewhere and Archer just picked up on the meme, but we definitely use "the Dane Cook of" to ascribe mediocrity.

And it IS really funny to say it!
posted by Snowishberlin at 10:13 AM on September 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think the best thing about Dane Cook is that bit where Tig Notaro keeps running into him and telling him how much she loves his voice.
posted by Naberius at 10:32 AM on September 23, 2020 [10 favorites]

I always get Dane Cook mixed up with that "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" guy.

Somehow he overlaps in mind with Zachary Levi, possibly because of their respective roles in the unrelated movie Good Luck, Chuck and the TV series “Chuck.” I am actually not sure I have ever seen Dane Cook in anything, save that he was apparently in Mystery Men, buried deep in the cast list. I rewatched MM a year or so ago and was astonished to learn that twenty years earlier I had watched a scene where Michael Bay and Cee-Lo Green get into an argument. Easy to overlook the very modest presence of Cook in that.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:47 AM on September 23, 2020 [3 favorites]

Hmm, what was that off-putting thing I read about Dane Cook a while back? Before hosting that viral Fast Times at Ridgemont High celebrity table read, Cook was most newsworthy in the past few years for dating a teenager. Oh, right. Dane Cook is still dating an Instagram influencer 26 years his junior, which continues to feel pretty gross. Thanks, MEL.
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:54 AM on September 23, 2020 [2 favorites]

I mean, Rolling Stone lists.. Dane Cook.. we get it, you're not the target audience. It's the degree of effort in displaying that disdain that, I don't know.. stare at a parody long enough and you become the parody?

Hater bait is baked into the whole idea of ranking listicles, and while I really don't know enough about Cook's act (or even his general persona, notwithstanding the fleeting impressions that I mentioned above), it's also a big part of a certain type of comedian's act: Andrew Dice Clay and Carlos Mencia, certainly. If your concern is the basic "fight not with monsters, lest ye become a monster" thing, well, Nietzche didn't have access to social media, and if I wanted to sample Cook's work, plenty of it is on YouTube so that I can get the general gist of what his shtick is, if I cared to. I really don't see that it requires much of an effort, frankly.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:00 AM on September 23, 2020

Well, it isn't as if there has been much cause to express opinions about Dane Cook recently aside from this post so there's a lot of pent up mehing that needed to be let out. I mean that is also kinda part of the point of the post after all, his disappearance from the spotlight needing to have come from lack of interest or worse.

(Just as there can be good reason to express dislike for celebrities, rankings, or any number of other seemingly bland subjects. There's little reason that Rolling Stone, Dane Cook, or fandom in general deserves to be off-limits to disparagement for their methods.)
posted by gusottertrout at 11:31 AM on September 23, 2020

In some regards, the article reads as a gauntlet thrown down at every other reactionary right-wing hack comedian:

"If Dane Cook, that attention-seeker, can retire to contented mediocrity, why can't you? Are you seriously more attention-seeking than Dane Cook?"
posted by explosion at 12:07 PM on September 23, 2020 [5 favorites]

His girlfriend's age contains less years than the age gap between them. And he appears to have befriended her when she was underage. I skimmed the article, but I'm not wasting my time on a redemption narrative for a predator.
posted by Ruki at 12:14 PM on September 23, 2020 [4 favorites]

Metafilter: a lot of pent up mehing that needed to be let out
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:15 PM on September 23, 2020 [8 favorites]

I don’t need to read this but in case anyone doesn’t know. His girlfriend is 26 years younger than him. She was 19 when they started dating. That’s all I need to know.
posted by Crystalinne at 12:49 PM on September 23, 2020 [3 favorites]

I don't think the author of the article is arguing that Cook doesn't kinda suck, just that there were a lot, an awful lot, of people who thought he was amazing and that created its own culture. That cultre was, itself, deeply toxic in a way that just one guy who was making easy lazy jokes and acting out his own id onstage wasn't. And that's a useful, to me anyhow, thinking point. A lot of these one-note assholes are just assholes but when they assemble a posse of knock-on assholes who are doing the same things but for worse reasons or with fewer checks and balances, that's when things can take a bad turn. I have watched some of Cook's standup and he's one of those guys who isn't my taste but is clearly gifted at the stuff he does. America's a mess of a place, but one of the hardest things to manage is terrible people being very popular. This article talks about some of that.
posted by jessamyn at 12:55 PM on September 23, 2020 [12 favorites]

I remember Marc Maron needling him pretty good on his podcast. Cook had been bullying a younger comedian, accusing him of “stealing his essence” or somehow ripping off his oeuvre. I don’t love everything about Maron but it felt like a reset switch had been thrown on Cook's brand.
posted by bonobothegreat at 12:57 PM on September 23, 2020

jessamyn got to the heart of it: the real problem isn't that assholes exist in the public sphere, but that so many people think that they're great. There are so many brilliant comedians around, but it's people like Cook or Andrew Dice Clay that sell out Madison Square Garden.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:03 PM on September 23, 2020

Are Cook and Clay really a good comparison? Everybody knew Clay was putting on an exaggerated persona but he was also using it to tell fundamentally nasty jokes. My impression of Cook is that, infamous cited show aside, he was mostly significantly more anodyne, bro-y in the sense that he would talk about his dick a lot but not deliberately super offensive - but that his demeanor was such that people took “Dane Cook” to be an asshole on a personal level (and suspected “Dane Cook” wasn’t just a persona).
posted by atoxyl at 1:15 PM on September 23, 2020

There are so many brilliant comedians around, but it's people like Cook or Andrew Dice Clay that sell out Madison Square Garden.

Sure, but the thing is one person's brilliant comedian is another's challenging one, so it's the innocuous and the low-brow (Gallagher comes to mind) that more easily assembles an MSG-scale audience. That's not exclusively true, it's just that the path to MSG is more easily walked for things that aim at the broad middle of the potential audience. That's commentary more on the country and the audience than the comedian, since I think to some extent if it's not Cook or Clay some other comedian would've been propelled to the same place by the demand for that sort of thing that's out there.
posted by axiom at 1:22 PM on September 23, 2020

Lindy West's 2010 piece for the Stranger, Gallagher Is a Paranoid, Right-Wing, Watermelon-Smashing Maniac
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:30 PM on September 23, 2020 [6 favorites]

To be clear I haven't thought or seen anything about Gallagher in, oh, probably 20 years or so, but am thoroughly unsurprised he turned out that way.
posted by axiom at 2:00 PM on September 23, 2020

If we're talking about Gallagher, we need to link to this 10-year-old comment on the blue.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:55 PM on September 23, 2020 [8 favorites]

After reading that amazing comment (thanks, Halloween Jack!) I'm now desperate for turducken to pop into this thread and give us a Gallagher update. I mean, he must be a Q-Anon guy these days, right?
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:08 PM on September 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

From that comment: If you go back and watch Gallagher's TV specials from the 70s and 80s, you'll see that they were filled with topical and political humor, as his shows are today. It's just that nobody much cared.

This 2015 Vulture piece, That Time Gallagher Displayed His True Awfulness and Then Stormed Out on Marc Maron: "Gallagher rages against the ghost of Johnny Carson for the unforgivable crime of not liking prop comics (despite Carson being a magician!, Gallagher notes) and details his unlikely ascent in show-business as the opening act for Kenny Rogers, who did not care for Gallagher’s Iranian Hostage Crisis-themed dick jokes, especially since his mother was in the audience. It’s an early indication that Gallagher’s xenophobia/racism are not of a recent vintage."

[Iranian Hostage Crisis, November 1979 through January 1981.]

axiom, I just meant you might want to use a different example for an innocuous and low-brow comedian going forward.

Comedian famous for smashing watermelons walked into the Idaho Capitol with 2 mallets (August, 2019). Gallagher was escorted out by security; "[Gallagher] came to Boise, he said, after finishing a show Friday in Lapeer, Michigan, east of Flint, to scout locations and make contact with film production companies. He’s looking to make a film adaptation of the life of Enheduanna, a Sumerian woman who lived in the 23rd century B.C. who is credited with being the first known poet. The story would start in Iraq and move to modern Manhattan, with women in each place battling the devil." Also wanted to develop a retirement community in Boise, which he called "a good little enclave."

Cook was touring last year, and, as lazaruslong mentioned, planning a comeback. The half-brother (Darryl McCauley, a Dane business manager) embezzled $18 million and was sentenced to 8 years for it.
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:33 PM on September 23, 2020 [4 favorites]

My first thought was, isn't Johnny Knoxville the voice of his generation, not Dane Cook, and then an idle search brought me the knowledge that there is another Jackass film coming out next year. Next year. 2021.
posted by betweenthebars at 5:08 PM on September 23, 2020 [4 favorites]

If we're talking about Gallagher, we need to link to this 10-year-old comment on the blue.

Or even more to the point, this one.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:42 PM on September 23, 2020 [2 favorites]

axiom, I just meant you might want to use a different example for an innocuous and low-brow comedian going forward.

That's fair, except I meant innocuous to a broad swath of the american public, and the fact that the guy who's making bad political and/or dick jokes could be overlooked by so many because he sledgehammers watermelons was kind of my point. It says something about Americans that so many regard that sort of thing as innocuous.

I should have been clearer that I myself do not find a lot of that material innocuous.
posted by axiom at 6:39 PM on September 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

I don’t need to read this but in case anyone doesn’t know. His girlfriend is 26 years younger than him. She was 19 when they started dating. That’s all I need to know.
posted by Crystalinne at 12:49 PM on September 23 [2 favorites +] [!]

Wait, How old is Dane Cook? How old am I? What year is it? Should I just go back to sleep?
posted by WeekendJen at 8:37 AM on September 24, 2020 [1 favorite]

I don’t need to read this but in case anyone doesn’t know. His girlfriend is 26 years younger than him. She was 19 when they started dating. That’s all I need to know.


So he's been in a committed relationship for many years, nice. Good for the two of them.
posted by Space Coyote at 5:35 PM on September 24, 2020 [2 favorites]

I don't know if that's a good takeaway.
posted by Carillon at 9:28 PM on September 24, 2020

You should let other people be happy.
posted by Space Coyote at 6:21 AM on September 25, 2020

Or: 45 year olds shouldn't date 19 year olds, even if the relationship lasts as long as 3 years.

That'd be my take.
posted by ambrosen at 8:29 AM on September 25, 2020 [3 favorites]