By TERRY MORROW
As a child, comic Dane Cook kept his funny business strictly at home.
"At home, I enjoyed comedy," he says. "That was my release, kidding with my family. I would entertain my family in the house. I had a lot of phobias, I guess, when it came to looking at someone in the eye or talking at school."
He'd break out in a sweat and couldn't find the words. But, he says, "I knew I wanted to be a performer."
Now, the 34-year-old Bostonian has done something his childhood fears would not have allowed. He made a comedy special in the round in front of a hometown audience.
"Dane Cook: Vicious Circle," airing at 9 p.m. EDT/PDT, Monday, Sept. 4, is his first major comedy special for HBO.
It comes at a time when Cook couldn't get much hotter. "Retaliation," his 2005 standup CD, was No. 1 on Billboard magazine's Hot 200 chart last year. "Dane Cook: Tourgasm," an HBO reality show about life on the road, just wrapped its first season.
"Employee of the Month" with Jessica Simpson is his next feature film. It hits theaters on Sept. 15. "Good Luck, Chuck" is his next movie. He's shooting it now with Jessica Alba.
All this work, and Cook says he doesn't get nervous before going on-stage anymore.
"I was so afraid when I was younger," he says. "Fear is where the good stuff is now. When I go on-stage, I like being on the cusp of things. That actually energizes me."
What does scare him now?
"Nothing new happening," he says. "That scares me a lot."
That's unlikely to happen anytime soon. Cook pulls from his life for his material.
"What I am on-stage is my mother and father because they are both very funny," he says. "My dad is kind of dry, wry, very low key, subtle, but with a cocky swagger at the same time.
"My mom was very animated. She wasn't afraid to make herself look like a fool."
When he decided to become a performer, he says, he "took the best parts" of the humor of his mother and father. But while he uses everyday antics from friends and family for his act, he changes the names to keep them from too much embarrassment.
Well, he doesn't always hold back. At one point his brother, Darryl McCauley, was his boss at Burger King. That point of his life has been the source of a lot of material for his act.
"He used to do the schedules in pen, but he did mine in pencil because I was always one step away from being taken out," he says with a laugh.
Cook also worked security at a mini-golf course, was the checkout guy at a video store and had a paper route until he was 17. (His brother, by the way, now works for Cook.)
The worst job, he says, was singing for nursing home shut-ins. "I tried to do little shows to entertain the elderly people," he says. But going to work only to be told that one of his favorites died always brought him down.
Still, Cook says that keeping his work personal is what he enjoys most about comedy. He says he does try to keep a personal touch with the way he delivers his comedy. He rarely performs from a prepared script of jokes he wrote out in advance.
"I am not a pen-to-paper-type of guy," he says. "I used to sit down and try to write (jokes), but I was already off (on another idea) before I could finish (writing).
"So now I just work it all out on-stage. I literally feel like I am building a better routine with my fans that way. I get a real reaction, not a formula."
