Comedian Dane Cook is so hot right now that you’d have to throw him in a furnace to cool him down.
Got a theater with 5,000, 10,000 or even 15,000 seats? In most cities, he’d sell it out for you within a few days.
Ticketmaster does not have a single seat left for his performance tonight at the 5,000-seat Lecture Hall at the Colorado Convention Center. (Cook also appears in the film “Waiting,” which hits Denver today.)
Cook’s name may not resonate yet as much with the general public as Jerry Seinfeld’s. But he did something this summer that Seinfeld never has done.
Cook’s three-disc set, “Retaliation,” debuted at No.4 on Billboard the week it was released in July. That’s No.4 on the magazine’s Top 200 Chart, which includes all genres of music as well as comedy albums.
The last comic to climb the charts higher was Steve Martin in 1978 with “A Wild and Crazy Guy.”
Cook has spent 15 hard years to become, as he put it, an overnight sensation. And he never doubted that it would happen.
“Retaliation” came out three years after his first album. That one never charted but sold more than 300,000 copies over the years, he said. Those numbers made him confident his second release would stir some talk.
“I said, ‘I know ‘Retaliation’ is going to be a monster,”‘ Cook said this week in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “I wasn’t sure it was going to be fourth on the Billboard chart, but I knew this was going to be a proof. … that I have staying power and the ability to take the fans into different media.”
But he knew even in 2001 that his time would come and that it would come big time.
“I can tell you the moment every thing turned the corner was (my) first ‘Comedy Central Presents,”‘ Cook said. “That was the first half-hour, 20 minutes, I had ever done on television.”
He figured the show would air two or three times and then disappear into the mist of the 3 a.m. time slot. But it became the highest-rated show on the cable network, he said.
“They just started airing that thing like crazy,” he said. “That special aired for three years nonstop. It still airs a lot. But I mean the first three years were like I couldn’t escape it.”
He did not expect all the exposure but was ready for it with a fan-friendly website on which he updated Cook news, wrote a blog and featured audio and video feeds.
More important, the website carried his e-mail address and his AOL instant-message name.
“That was basically all I did,” Cook said. “I do shows, and after the shows I would come home and work online all night, talking to people. … I’d be home cutting and pasting and talking to people about comedy. I literally would instant-message for hours, just randomly picking people.”
That strange behavior spurred his comedian friends to make more than a few jokes about Cook turning down offers of beers so he could go home and sit at a computer, alone and in his underwear.
He laughed with them and then resumed typing, and cutting and pasting.
“It was like I formed an online street team,” he said. “But my street team was everybody.”
Cook also built fan loyalty by acting more like a country singer than a comedian. He held meet-and-greet events after all his shows, sometimes taking it beyond the pale, as he did on a long tour with three supporting acts.
“I told them that at all 20 of the university shows we’re going to do a meet-and-greet,” Cook recalled. “Some of them were even over 10,000 seats. So we would be doing meet-and-
greets that lasted 4 to 4 1/2 hours. I mean it was insane.”
Cook said he felt compelled to do it as a way of showing his appreciation to the audiences that allow him to do the only thing he has ever wanted to do.
Now, screaming young women show up at his concerts waving “I Love You” signs. Others carry the same legend on T- shirts.
And, man, that’s real hot.
Staff writer Ed Will can be reached at 303-820-1694 or ewill@denverpost.com.
Dane Cook
STAND-UP COMEDY|Lecture Hall at the Colorado Convention Center, 700 14th St., 8 tonight | $24.50-$44.50 (SOLD OUT)|303-830-8497 or ticketmaster.com
