Dane Cook Sold Out Madison Square Garden Twice in a Night. He's Better Than You Think

There are two ways to be hated in American comedy. One is to be unfunny and unknown, which is free and open to the public, and which most people take up after a bad Thursday at an open mic. The other is to be Dane Cook in 2007, which costs a good deal more to achieve and comes with a bus.

Here's what he was hated for. In August 2005 his album Retaliation debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200, reported at the time as the first comedy record in the top five since Steve Martin's A Wild and Crazy Guy in 1978. That's 27 years. Whole careers lived and died inside that gap, and most of them, if you read the obituaries, blamed the booker. It went double platinum. Then in November 2007 he became the second comic, after Andrew Dice Clay, to sell out the big room at Madison Square Garden, and he did it twice in one night, a feat my uncle also claimed for years with far less documentation.

He got there in a way that now looks like prophecy. Cook was among the first comedians to build an audience with a personal website and MySpace, collecting fans one at a time like a man going door to door with a Bible. In 2005 that was considered a little desperate. Today every 24-year-old comic with a ring light and a posting schedule is doing Dane Cook's homework, and they've had the good sense not to thank him, since it would cost them followers.

The case against him is real, and it deserves its turn. Joe Rogan said Cook did one of his bits. Louis C.K. later said Cook got sloppy with some jokes but didn't steal knowingly, and Cook then played himself in a 2011 episode of Louie about the whole dispute, which is more than most accused men will do. Generally they don't show up for the reenactment. There was also Employee of the Month and Good Luck Chuck, and I won't defend them. A man can't hold every fort. Napoleon had some wonderful years, and nobody brings up Russia as a plus.

But look at what the charge actually was. Nobody said he bombed. The charge, as the Boston Globe recalled it, was that he was "destroying comedy," and comedy has survived vaudeville, the Depression and the two-drink minimum, so I'd say the patient was stronger than the doctors let on. Saturday Night Live had him host in December 2005, then brought him back to open its next season a year later. That show doesn't return a man to the premiere out of pity. It employs Lorne Michaels so that nobody there will ever have to feel any.

The arena crowds weren't confused, either. They'd come to watch a man run around a stage acting out the smallest possible thing at the largest possible size, and they went home happy, which is the only transaction a comedian has ever really been in. The sneering mostly came from people working rooms of thirty, and I've noticed the view from a room of thirty is always very clear on what's wrong with the Garden.

Cook turned 50 and told the Globe in 2022 that he still has his haters and has come to think a performer needs them, since the alternative is being bland. Along the way he also voiced a talking crop duster in the Planes movies, which is about how the American dream goes: you begin despised by every comic in the country, and you finish up in the sky, spraying things, adored by toddlers.

Nobody ever gets called the death of an art form until he's started making money at it, and the art form always attends the funeral in a nicer suit than it could afford before.