Dane Cook has a lot of comedic talents, but traditional joke-telling isn’t one of them. The setup/punchline approach to stand-up is “not my strong suit because I have this physical element,” he told Cincinnati Magazine.
At the height of his 2000s peak, Cook showed off that gift for physical comedy in sketches like “Turtleneck” on Saturday Night Live. His frantic, full-bodied stand-up relied more on storytelling than joke-jokes, such as his popular early bit about getting his first job at Burger King.
But hey, you never know when a comedy career might take a new direction. “I just happened to say something on stage a few months ago that you might say is a vintage setup with a punchline,” he boasted. “I didn’t write it ahead of time, it just happened on stage. It was just click-click-boom, setup-punchline, and I loved it. Maybe there’s more of that to come.”
Considering that the accidental joke happened a few months ago, the smart money says Cook’s stand-up style isn’t changing anytime soon. As far back as 2004, the comic confessed that he wasn’t one for crafting traditional punchlines. “I don’t really write the classic way by sitting down and writing my jokes,” he told the Quinnipeac Chronicle. “I get bored like that.”
Instead, Cook invented jokes on the fly. “I try to just go up on stage with the idea and improvise with it and find the beats with people. If I just write something by myself, then I get tangled up, but if I’m having a conversation with you about something funny, then I’m really getting a back and forth, so I do that with a crowd.”
Making things up as he goes means his comedy won’t consistently deliver laughs. Johnny Carson, his early comedy idol, taught him that kind of failure was okay.
“He’d have a terrible moment in his monologue, and you’d be talking about that the next day and not the great jokes he landed,” Cook remembered. “Like when the cue cards fell on the floor and he didn’t know what to do. Whatever something like that occurs, I’m present and real.”
Cook remembered another interview Carson gave after taking over The Tonight Show from Jack Paar. Cook paraphrased his idol as saying, “If you’re truly a performer, you use everything — your trauma, the impression you did when you were eight that made your aunt laugh, the one and only dance move you learned from a girl in high school.”
That’s why Cook throws everything at the wall to see what will stick. “I can be scary, silly, foolish, anything I want on stage, but I have to be real,” he said. “And those two things from Johnny keep me afloat. I wake up every day and say, I’m excited to try something new.”
Maybe even setups and punchlines.
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