Cook finds right recipe for success; Determined to succeed in a career of telling jokes, Dane is feeling fortunate (The Province)

Russell Peters' fans might disagree, but Dane Cook is arguably the biggest name in stand-up comedy. The 37-year-old Bostonian is a tireless workhorse whose skip-the-media approach to his fans has turned him into a megastar.

For years, Cook appealed to his fans directly via an impressive online presence on the social networking site MySpace (2,581,756 friends and counting!), allowing him to steer clear of the ink-stained wretches.

"I had this fan base that was so tenacious and so on the pulse of what I was doing that I didn't feel at that time that I really needed to do very much press," he said on the phone from his home in Los Angeles yesterday, one day ahead of his show at GM Place. "I could get on MySpace, I could put out one note and places would sell out."

Not that he needs help putting bums in seats these days. It's just that his plan backfired somewhat. While his legion of fans swear he's the best thing to ever happen to comedy, his success saw the inevitable backlash that comes with crazy fame.

"There was a lot of misunderstanding about me and who I was and my passion for stand-up comedy. The rumour mill and innuendo kind of became the truth on the bathroom wall," he says. "So I found it was a bit of a disservice to not get out there and talk to people like yourself and let them know what I'm really about."

He claims he expected the adverse reaction since it had been years since the likes of Steve Martin and Andrew "Dice" Clay were performing comedy on that kind of level.

"There's nowhere to go when you hit that upper echelon, especially when you're exposed to that many more people that truly just don't find you funny," he says. "The more people find you funny, the much more people that don't find you funny. So you just kind of roll with those punches."

Cook received an unexpected punch back in 2006 at Yuk Yuk's on Burrard Street. While in town shooting Good Luck Chuck, he dropped into the local comedy club to do a guest set -- a huge surprise for the crowd. As reported in The Province at the time, Cook performed for 35 minutes ahead of headliner Peter Kelamis before the club decided he needed to get off the stage. They cut his mic and blasted music from the speakers, a fine how-do-you-do for someone of his stature.

"What I thought was kind of a cool little pop-in, after the fact I learned it turned into a bit of a debacle locally," he says. "But I gotta tell you, from my perspective, I walked into the club and was welcomed with open arms. I had no clue at the time of performing that I was going to be ruffling any feathers. I just went in to give some comedy to that great club and learned after the fact that it was a bit of a fire storm once I left."

Cook says he was certainly "a little miffed," but it was just one of life's interesting moments.

"No harm, no foul. The fans got a cool show," he says. "And to the other comics that were talking smack, I can't tell you how many nights I got bumped in New York City by the Chris Rocks and the Ray Romanos. It goes with the territory. But, yeah, that was a bit of a strange night, but it would not deter me from wanting to come up and give a small show again for those great fans."

No small show this time around, though. His arena shows are an event. It's theatre in the round, and it works, he says, because of his amazing light, sound and camera crew.

"It's almost like going to a baseball game where you get to look at the field and see the game, but then you get to see perspective on a replay that you might not have seen before."

One of his openers, Al Delbene, has been a friend since the two were 14 years old and had stars in their eyes. "He was the first person I ever told outside of my family that I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. He actually said back to me, 'Wow, that's funny because I want to be a stand-up comedian.' Here we are now, gosh, 26-27 years later still performing together."

Cook has always been driven to succeed. He has set attendance records left and right, holds the endurance record at the Laugh Factory for performing seven straight hours, did the longest monologue in Saturday Night Live history, and sees his albums consistently on the Billboard charts. But, he says, he doesn't set out with records in mind.

"I'm not an outwardly competitive person. I really am not," he claims. "But I am very competitive with myself, which means pushing myself beyond being derivative of what I've done before and wanting to mail it in or repeat myself just to make a few dollars. So I guess by continuing to expand my repertoire, get better and continuing to push myself further, I've had some nice dalliances with some historic moments. And I attribute that to the fans. I really do. All of those successes come to great comedy fans who allow me to still come into their homes, into their lives, and they listen to my random thoughts and my point of view. It really is all about the fans. So those things say more about my fans than they do about me."

With his single-minded determination, it's really no surprise he's scaled the heights he has.

"I was pretty much driven from the beginning," he says. "I started stand-up when I was 19 and I told my folks, 'Listen, this is what I'm going to do. This is where I want to be.' My mom embraced it. My dad, it took him a little bit longer. What I told my folks was if you support me on this, I won't be just a kind of funny guy. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to take this to hopefully an upper echelon that you will be proud of and that I'll be proud of. So I didn't set out to do this just to sling a couple of funny jokes. I wanted to make a mark somewhere, and I feel very very fortunate that things worked out that way."

Snowy road to Kaml . . . oops!; Duo still sees funny side of missing out on gig (The Province)

Back in June, when comedians Dan Quinn, Ed Byrne, Craig Campbell and Glenn Wool met in Wool's North London home to discuss a January tour of B.C., they thought it would be funny to play up the cold Canadian winters angle.

Now not so much.

So it was that the Snowed In Comedy Tour was literally snowed in. At least on Day 1 for two of the comics. Calgary native, and former Vancouverite, Campbell was eager to play tour director for Irishman Byrne and his wife, along with Campbell's British partner and her son. Their mission: to get from Nelson to Kamloops. Easy enough for someone who's done many a drive between provinces in his 19 years on the road.

Mission impossible, it turns out.

Waking up in the little B&B on the shores of Kootenay Lake to no power and rainfall on top of gooey snow, the road warriors made a go of it anyway. They piled in to their rented 4x4 and set off on their journey. Showtime at Sun Peaks was at 9 pm. Lots of time.

"An incredibly picturesque dawdle is what I had in my head," says Campbell, who has carved out a very successful comedy career in Europe after playing second fiddle to a sock for seven seasons on Ed's Night Party in Toronto. "I was hoping to be pointing out bald eagles and talking about Kokanee salmon and their unique properties in our world. And we get onto the main road and it's very nearly carnage."

In Slocan, they were met with avalanche bars across the road. Thinking laterally, he thought of the Creston-Radium Hot Springs-Golden route on to Revelstoke, but Highway 1 was closed from Golden to Sicamous.

"I started to realize how really socked in we were," he says.

The only option was to cut down through the U.S., which is easier said than done with passengers holding three different passports. But where there's a will, there's either a dead person or a way. Thankfully, it was the latter.

"Luckily we get the nicest guy we could ever hope to meet at the American border. He's really quite charming to deal with. He sees the Conan O'Brien credit on the poster and asks Ed if he's met Conan O'Brien," Campbell laughs. "He's not sycophantic but he's really keen and interested. It wasn't a butter-up; it was a real wonderful, sincere conversation with the guy who really wanted to know stuff about the show. I felt there were all sorts of things he could have done to us but he just fast-tracked us."

Not fast enough, however. Despite only an hour's drive through the States, they didn't arrive to their 8 o'clock gig until 11:45, fifteen minutes after Quinn and Wool finished the show on their own.

"We just missed it. It just wasn't to be," he says philosophically. "It was frustrating but it couldn't have been funnier to be snowed in on the Snowed In Comedy Tour."

If there's anything to be gained from this experience it's that Campbell, who's known as one of the best storytellers in the business, will come away with tons of new material.

"It was actually on so many levels a great experience to have with people in the car that aren't from here because it underlines what's a pretty normal Canadian experience is quite abnormal in many parts of the globe," he says.

Byrne won't make the last leg of the journey, which stops in Vancouver at the Rio Theatre. But Campbell, Quinn and Wool, three headliners in their own right, can more than carry the load.

"I'm very, very happy to be playing Vancouver again. I've not been there for so long," says Campbell, who last was here about five years ago. The wild-haired 39-year-old has been living in England, as has Vancouverite Wool, for years and fits right in to the southern England rustic lifestyle. He's in no hurry to move back.

"I love Canada," he says. "It's my favourite holiday."

D-List helps put Kathy Griffin on A-List; Griffin now an Emmy winner and YouTube hit (The Province)

Kathy Griffin is on a roll. At least a Kathy Griffin kind of roll.

Last week, on a New Year's Eve telecast with Anderson Cooper on CNN, Griffin used a squelch made popular by nightclub comedians from time immemorial that features some salty language. Going to commercial, Griffin shouted good-naturedly to a bystander, "I don't go to your job and knock the d---s out of your mouth."

Perfectly acceptable in a comedy club. But on the venerable news station? Turns out that's OK, too.

Griffin, who performs two shows at the River Rock Show Theatre on Saturday, insists she thought the program had already gone to a break. When she found out otherwise, she immediately turned to her co-host and said, "Are you in trouble? Am I in trouble? Are we fired? Are you fired?" Cooper was nonplussed. "He acted like it was nothing," she says on the phone from her home in Los Angeles. "He said, 'No! It's cable. The FCC doesn't govern it.'"

Still, it got people talking. Which is something the self-proclaimed D-list celebrity covets. She also revelled in her 2007 Primetime Emmy win for her reality series Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List when she accepted the award saying, "Suck it, Jesus. This award is my god now." That bon mot got her condemned by the Catholic League. All well and good for the lapsed Catholic. But the joke on CNN has made her an instant splash on the Internet.

"You have no idea how excited I am at the age of 48 to be a YouTube sensation," she says. "I have never in my whole career had what they call the YouTube moment and now it's had something like a million views. I am absolutely in heaven. I live for this s--t."

With all this publicity, it's only fitting that in her fifth season, which airs on Bravo in the U.S. and the Comedy Network in Canada, the theme is that she's an A-lister in training. So she gets advice from the likes of Bette Midler, Rosie O'Donnell, Gloria Estefan and Lily Tomlin. In fact, Griffin is coming up a day early just to catch Tomlin, who's appearing at the same venue on Friday. (See story on opposite page.)

"When I talk to Lily Tomlin," Griffin says, "I'm sure that she will be one of many, many Oscar nominees and Grammy winners that will say, 'Maybe you shouldn't say things like that.' But I can't help myself!"

She dishes it out and her fans eat it up. Griffin draws from all quarters but is especially popular in the gay community.

"I call them the unshockable gays," she says. To her, they're the ideal audience because they're an oppressed minority who have real world problems they are confronted with daily.

"Who knows if somebody used a slur or if in any way they had to deal with any kind of anti-gay sentiment in their day," she says, "so by the time they come to a comedy show they're just willing to go there with me. They want to laugh. Gay audiences are the very least likely to walk out in shock at anything I say. I mean, what haven't they heard?"

If there happens to be a dissatisfied customer or two, though, she doesn't sweat it. On the contrary, she welcomes it.

"I like to think I haven't really done my job until at least one person's walked out," she says.