WTF Happened to Dane Cook?

Last Updated on November 22, 2023

Specializing in fast paced story telling and observational humor… and being loud. Dane Cook can often be seen moving all over that stage as he uses his entire body to tell a joke. He also used social media to promote himself before that was even a thing. Mr. Cook comes off like your energetic roommate ranting in the living room after a few too man brewskis…and its kinda a beautiful thing to watch and like it or not, he was exactly what the world of comedy needed at that time.

Dane Cook’s style was soon embraces by millions, allowing him to fill up stadiums with laughing frat boys and and comedy connoisseurs alike. He stole the hearts of many young people… and stole the jokes of many funny people… or just happened to have the same funny thought. The dude became more of a rockstar than a stand up comedian but as time went on, it seems many people have left this once stadium selling out comedian in the dust. With a few under-performing movies to his name and a comedy career that seems to have fallen off a bit, its time we take a look at just WTF happened to Dane Cook?

The Early Days

Dane Cook was born on March 18th, 1972, in Massachusetts. He would catch the comedy bug while in high school and would begin performing stand up in 1990 while also studying graphic design in College, a skill that would come in handy for his later success. By 1992, Cook had begun to make headway in the world of stand up and would be invited to perform at the renowned Boston Garden as part of a local radio stations concert that featured such acts as the Spin Doctors and Phish. But the music hungry audience was not in the mood for comedy and threw shoes as Dane, forcing him the exit stage left.

But that is the life of a comedian – one night you bomb harder than you’ve ever bombed, sometime you even sustain injuries from a rogue shoes, but you don’t give up. For Cook, he would pick up and move to New York City in 1994 where he would perform nightly before moving to Los Angeles. As everyone knows, stand up comedy is not a sprint, its a marathon. It can take someone years, even decades to see even the littlest bit of success. Despite landing roles on shows such as the Marie Osmond/ Betty White short lived series Maybe This Time in 1995, the 1998 Rene Russo film Buddy and a guest spot on the Brooke Shields series Suddenly Susan, Cook was still struggling to find success in the comedy world. However, after making his television debut on Letterman in 1997, Cook would be featured on the hit Comedy Central stand up showcase Premium Blend where his act was a stand out and would result in him landing his own half hour special on the Comedy Central Presents show.

Online Breakthrough

After struggling for a few more years, in 2002, Cook would take a hefty chunk of change, $25,000 to be exact and create his own website DaneCook.com as a way to get his comedy directly out to the people that couldn’t see him live. But it would a 2003 invention that would propel Cook to the upper echelon. On August 1, 2003, everyone’s first ever digital friend Tom, created a social networking website known as MySpace. The site would allow you to personalize your own homepage with pictures and music while inviting “friends” to join your page. You could even passive aggressively tell the world who you liked most by rearranging your “Top Friends.” Cook would create his MySpace page and link it directly to his website. It wouldn’t take long before Cook had amassed over 1.5 million friends on Social Network, essentially becoming the worlds first influencer. But what Cook did with this new technology was use it to speak directly to his fans. He would reply to upwards of 25,000 people a night, messaging them by name and creating true connections with his fans.

To some, this method of achieving fame was cheating, and the comedy world let him know it. While many comedians had to toil away at late night open mic nights and bark on the street with printed ads, Cook embraced a new found technology and used it to his advantage. Something many of those same people that criticized Cook, now use on a daily basis. It can be argued that Dane Cook revolutionized how the world received content because in today’s world, you can’t get a callback at an audition without some sort of web presence while speaking directly with your fans is an everyday occurrence.

With his popularity at a fever pitch, Cook would release his first album Harmful if Swallowed in 2003 which would go on to be certified platinum by the RIAA, even after he released it onto to pirating sites like Napster. For Cook, the money was secondary to the actual success. He just wanted people to hear his material. His success on the internet would see him start to sell out college campuses nationwide while his graphic design background helped him create his iconic two finger logo, aka the SuFi (or Super Finger). Two years later he would release Retaliation which became the first comedy album since 1978’s A Wild and Crazy Guy by Steve Martin to reach the Top 5 on the Billboard 200 before being certified double platinum and creating the term “Karen” to describe a douche bag woman, which has become so popular in the past few years. He would start bringing camera crews with him on tour so he could post videos to his MySpace page which would result in HBO giving him his own special Vicious Circle followed by the miniseries Tourgasm. 

His shows would go from selling 3000 tickets to filling up 12,000 seat arenas and becoming only the second comedian in history to sell out Madison Square Garden… twice (the first being Andrew Dice Clay) resulting in the album Dane Cook: Rough Around The Edges. But yet, mainstream media shunned him. He says that despite his success, no major publication would ever give him any press. Until the press they did give him was about how much they hated him and couldn’t understand how he became so successful. But his success was undeniable and he would soon land spots on the VMA’s, hosting Saturday Night Live twice, hosting the Teen Choice Awards and appearing on various talk shows where his enthusiasm was infectious, while also feeling a bit forced.

Cook would take his fame on the stage and turn it into a decent movie career. Of course many of us may remember him as the Waffler in a brief scene from the 1999 film Mystery Men, a scene that was so popular Smash Mouth used it as the intro to their music video for All Star. He would also star as Nick Miranda in the classic Dennis Rodman film Simon Sez which has a 0% rotten tomatoes score and made less than $300,000 at the box office. Cook would appear in projects such as the Hong Kong martial arts film The Touch opposite Michelle Yeoh, as a prank caller on the hit comedy central series Crank Yankers with roles in films such as Stuck on You, Windy City Heat, Mr. 3000, even though you don’t actually see him in the Sausage Mascot outfit and Torque while also stepping behind the camera for the short film 8 Guys.

Employee of the Month, Mr. Brooks and other movies

In 2005, Cook would land a more substantial role in the hilarious, and cautionary, film Waiting… where he would play a line cook who adds a little… zest, to your dish if you are rude to your waitress! After appearing opposite Amber Heard in the film London (2005), Cook would finally land his first starring role in a mainstream comedy film, starring opposite Jessica Simpson and Dax Shepard in 2006’s Employee of the Month which made a respectable $38.4 million off of a $12 million budget and serves as one of those early 2000’s comedies that is actually pretty good. The success of that film, mixed with his massive popularity in stand up would see 2006-2007 turn into big years for Cook with 4 films released including voicing a penguin in the Bob Sager directed parody Farce of the Penguins. While headlining the comedy Good Luck Chuck opposite Jessica Alba which was another box office hit pulling in nearly $60 million off a $25 million budget. Of course critics were no fans of his films as he and Alba would be nominated for Worst Screen Combo at the Razzie Awards. But Cook would start to branch out, and would appear opposite Academy Award Winners Kevin Costner and William Hurt in the vastly underrated Mr. Brooks (which never got the sequels it deserved). Of course Costner, Hurt and Demi Moore got most of the praise for the film, but Cook does a solid job breaking away from his comedy roots as a wannabe serial killer. He would end 2007 starring the dramedy Dan in Real Life playing Steve Carell’s brother where he would again show some range.

Did Dane Cook steal material?

Of course 2006 would also be the year things would start to go off the rails when he was accused of the most heinous thing a stand up comedian can be accused of: stealing jokes. Most notably similar bits to Louis C.K about naming your child, an itchy posterior region and witnessing a car crash. Some bits such as the naming your child bit can be traced back to a bit by Steve Martin form the 70’s. Other comedians such as Dimitri Martin and Joe Rogan have also had bits supposedly stolen by Cook. For his part Cook has maintained that he never stole any bits from anyone while many fans point out that the bits are so general that it is possible that each individual thought of the premise on their own before performing it on stage. Cook would even appear on an episode of Louie where he and Louis C.K discuss the joke stealing. Although it is a piece of scripted material, you can see the real toll those accusations took on Cook.

But an even bigger toll was being taken on Cook within his own family; discovering that his own half brother was stealing millions from him. It broke Dan’e heart but he pressed charges which resulted in prison time for his thieving family member. Dane would take time off from public life with only the already filmed My Best Friend’s Girl released in 2008 to horrible reviews and a box office of just $41 million. In 2009 he would release a new stand up special titledISolated INcident where the venue was much smaller and more intimate than his previous stadium settings with many people noticing a darker tinge to his material with jokes about the 2012 Dark Knight Rises theater shooting making their way online to the scorn of the woke mob before that term was a thing.

Since his heyday in the early to mid 2000’s, Cook has faded to the background. Every so often you will see him pop up on TV in shows like Hawaii Five-0, Comedy Bang Bang, American Gods and a hilarious turn as a bro-centric boss on Workaholics while appearing in films like Detention, Guns Girls and Gambling, 400 Days, Planes and Planes: Fire and Rescue. Cook provided some voices for the second highest grossing video game ever made: Grand Theft Auto V while he would star in the NBC series Next Caller which unfortunately never got picked up to go to series. In 2019 Cook would step back behind the camera for the short film American Typecast about a middle-eastern actor forced to always play a terrorist on screen and would again go against his brand by starring in the triller American Exit.

Dane Cook Now

But since then, Cook has maintained a fairly quiet lifestyle; popping up on podcasts where many of the same comedians interviewing him are the ones who gave him crap for his rise to fame, yet they now understand that he was a pioneer of how they all promote themselves in today’s social media driven world. In September 2023 he would marry his fiancé Kelsi Taylor, of course that isn’t without its own controversy as Taylor is 26 years younger than Cook and they had been together since she was just 18 years old. And brought back rumors of “game nights” involving Mr. Cook and very very very young women…girls… Something the internet has taken him to task for calling him a “groomer” while he has taken it in stride and joked about it in his most recent stand up special 2022’s Above it All. 

So yeah, they tried to cancel him but it didn’t really stick. And that is where we find Dane Cook today, still bringing his unique brand of comedy to the fans that have stuck with him the past twenty years while enjoying what appears to be a much more quiet lifestyle than he once lived. Sure his big screen career never truly took off, but his passion was always stand up comedy which is still something he does to this very day. It is why no one should give a F what happened to Dane Cook, because he is clearly doing just fine!

This episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity is written by Brad Hamerly, and edited, narrated & produced by Taylor James Johnson. If you like this how, also check out their latest project for JoBlo – SCANDALS – including our latest episode on the infamous Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard trial. Watch it here!