You remember Dane Cook, the most popular comedian of the mid-to-late 2000s. At least,
you do if you're a millennial. There was a time when you couldn't get through a
conversation without someone referencing a Dane Cook joke. So why don't you hear from him anymore?
If there's one thing guaranteed to get you blacklisted as a comedian,
it's plagiarism. Especially when the finger-pointing is coming from
one of the giants in your field. That's what happened to Dane Cook when he was
accused of ripping off jokes from controversial comedian Louis C.K.
Comedy fans noticed that some of Cook's bits from his 2005 album Retaliation,
seemed to be lifted from C.K.'s Live in Houston from 2001. Cook first addressed
the controversy on Marc Maron's WTF podcast in 2010, saying emphatically,
"I didn't steal anything from Louis C.K."
And C.K., who had never out-and-out accused Cook admitted,
"I think it's possible he might have seen these bits and absorbed them,
and not known that he took them from me."
The two finally seemed to squash the beef in a 2011 episode of C.K.'s show Louie,
in which C.K. has to swallow his pride to ask Cook to get Lady Gaga tickets for his daughter.
One reason Dane Cook's rise and fall from stardom seemed particularly fast
may have been that — and this is gonna sting — he just wasn't that funny to begin with. At least,
other comedians and critics didn't seem to think so. The headline for an absolutely brutal article
in the Associated Press queried, "Is Dane Cook Actually Funny?” It then rounded up reviews in
magazines like Rolling Stone and Slate to answer: no, not really. The Associated Press article also
quoted fellow comedians, who had less than glowing things to say. The article notes,
"Cook's material — like his fondness for Burger King, watermelon-flavored Jolly Rancher candies,
guilt after cheating on a girlfriend — are predicated on their commonness."
And according to a similarly brutal write-up in The New York Times,
"In certain comedy and media circles, contempt for Mr. Cook is knee-jerk, even cliché."
It's hard to make it in any industry if none of your peers are in your corner.
Maybe it was only a matter of time before Cook faded away.
In general, you tend to think that comedians prefer to be the ones doing the mocking rather
than being the recipients of mockery. At the very least, you don't want the jokes at your expense
to outweigh the amount of positive feedback you're getting. And by the end of the 2000s, Dane Cook's
roasts-to-praise ratio was looking pretty grim. He'd even become something of a stock joke.
Take, for example, the running gag on Family Guy, which featured a satirical
Dane Cook character. In fact, Ike Barinholtz, who voiced Family Guy's Dane Cook character,
also played him in MadTV parodies of the maligned comedian. In one skit,
Barinholtz paces manically back and forth in Cook's signature style, and jokes,
"Why is it called TV? Shouldn't it be called T-ME because I'm the one watching it."
Cook even made it onto Gawker's list of "The Most Hated Comedians of All Time."
"Superstardom and fame, what it really does when you get there is
it invites you, and exposes you to, okay ready, welcome, now here's everyone that hates you."
Perhaps part of the reason people got tired of Dane Cook was that people were just tired
of Dane Cook-style comedy. At the height of his fame in the late 2000s and early 2010s,
Cook was still doing his loud, rude, observational comedy that was heavy on the loud and light on the
observation. At the same time, more nuanced styles like that of Tig Notaro were getting more popular.
In 2012, Notaro released her famous special Live, which she performed soon after facing
a life-threatening illness and the death of her mother. In the shadow of this
heartfelt but also hilarious performance, Cook's fratty bits looked a bit coarse.
Cultural trends come and go, even in comedy, and it looked like Cook just
wasn't able to keep up with the times. In fact, many argued that as he got more famous,
his earlier, more honest material gave way to a new, cocky style that put people off.
Dane Cook had what you might call a soft cancelation. It wasn't one big news story or
controversy that caused the whole world to shun him. He just got less popular. This might be a
bit obvious, but a big part of the reason that we haven't heard much from Cook in the past decade is
that he stopped going on tour altogether. Before his not-so-big comeback in 2019,
Cook's last stand-up tour, Under Oath, was in 2013. After Under Oath, Cook took a 6-year
hiatus — so it's no wonder people stopped talking about him. One write-up in Mel Magazine observed,
"Cook lives life like a man who is euphorically washed. Never again
will he feel the need to overthink his tweets, reignite his legacy or bleed for his jokes."
But while Cook more or less disappeared from public joke-telling for a while,
he told The Daily Beast's "The Last Laugh" podcast in October that his latest standup special was,
quote, "a long time coming." Let's see what all that vibing has done for his material.
The key to any good comeback is, first and foremost, to get people to notice that a
comeback is actually occurring. But even though it was his first live tour in over half a decade,
Dane Cook's "Tell It Like It Is" tour in 2019 didn't manage to capture the attention of,
well, much of anyone really. Though we did find a few articles promoting the comeback, we had a hard
time finding anyone who had actually reviewed it, much less liked it. The tour didn't seem
to launch any new projects or specials, and Cook still wasn't getting the same kinds of blockbuster
movie roles he'd been known for in the late 2000s. It was, in the end, a pretty quiet affair.
That said, in all fairness, we will acknowledge that being 2019, this tour took place right
before the global pandemic. According to Cook, he had just performed at Radio City Music Hall
and was set to tape the special right after that when COVID-19 shut everything down. Which is why
he hopes 2021 — when the special was actually filmed — will be the real year of the comeback.
Look, we're not saying that Dane Cook has had the most challenging life of anyone we've ever come
across, but that doesn't mean he's always had it easy. And in fact, there was one major blow
that quite possibly could have contributed to his career stalling out. In 2010, Cook's half-brother
was convicted of embezzling millions of dollars from him while acting as his personal manager.
The brother, Darryl McCauley, apparently stole millions from Cook between the years of 2004
and 2008 by simply paying himself out of Cook's accounts. According to CNN,
McCauley and his wife were ordered to repay Cook $12 million. At least Cook appears to
have reached a level of Zen over the crime where he can joke about it. When a question
about the incident appeared on Jeopardy!, Cook jokingly tweeted a video of himself saying,
"I love Jeopardy, I can just watch it and get away from it all."
As your dad might say, everyone's allowed a mulligan once in a while.
It just seems like Dane Cook's latest acting roles have been mostly mulligans — which may
be part of the reason it feels like you haven't seen him in a while. Take the 2015 movie 400
Days. Remember that one? Yeah, neither does anyone else. Which seems to be for the best,
as it was widely panned by critics. The film currently has a 22% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
"Am I the only sane one here?"
Cook's 2019 flop American Exit didn't even get the dignity of a high-brow review. And while his
episode of American Gods was generally deemed fine by critics, the show never made enough
of a splash to successfully relaunch Cook's career — or establish him as a serious actor.
Learning from past mistakes and growing as a person and an artist?
You love to see it. And it appears that part of Dane Cook's disappearing act was on purpose.
Speaking to Fast Company, Cook explained that he had to learn how to actually say
"no" to projects that weren't going to work for him. Cook told the outlet:
"I didn't always like the movies I was making. I started turning a lot of those things down that
were derivative and there was a good little period of time when my agents were pissed."
That's not to say he's stopped working entirely. As he explained in the interview,
Cook just started to take his time with projects he really believed in.
And after a particularly hard year in 2010, he intentionally took some time to slow down,
get his finances in order, and work on himself. Cook told Fast Company:
"It felt strange that year off, getting part of an idea and not
allowing myself to go to the Laugh Factory and work it out on stage."
It's also possible that Dane Cook is too busy with his personal life to go all-in on his comedy and
acting career these days. Or, perhaps, he and his much younger girlfriend, Kelsie Taylor,
just don't want to hear the critiques about their relationship. This makes sense,
as the headlines about the 26-year age gap when their romance became public in 2017 marked the
first time Cook had been in the press in a while. At the time, Cook was 45 and Taylor was just 19.
Despite the criticism, Cook and Taylor seem to still be going strong,
and they have said that they don't let the haters get to them. Early in the relationship,
Cook took to Instagram Stories to answer fan questions, and when asked
if he had any advice for other people in relationships with large age gaps he joked,
"The only thing you have to do is plan that your deaths will be somewhat far apart."
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