Dane Cook
The comedian who built an arena act out of a MySpace page. Dane Cook's Retaliation debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 in 2005, the most successful comedy-album debut since Steve Martin, and by late 2007 he was selling out Madison Square Garden twice in one night while half the internet argued over whether the jokes were his.
Cook was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1972 and started working comedy clubs in 1990. The climb was slow: a 1998 spot on Comedy Central's Premium Blend was the break, a half-hour Comedy Central Presents followed in June 2000, and his first album, Harmful If Swallowed, came out on Comedy Central Records in July 2003 and eventually went platinum. What set him apart was what he did between gigs. In December 2003 he put up a MySpace page, three weeks before the site officially opened by Forbes' account, and worked it daily with updates and links back to DaneCook.com, where the jokes and clips lived.
It compounded. By June 2006 about 1.2 million MySpace "friends" were linked to the page, and he used them like a mailing list: when HBO taped a special at Boston's Garden, he gave fans early access through a password-protected presale, both shows sold out in under a week, and the promoters never spent the $125,000 they had budgeted for ads. "Dane has used the Internet to create and maintain a unique relationship with his audience," HBO chief Chris Albrecht said. Retaliation, released July 26, 2005, debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200, the most successful comedy album debut since Steve Martin's A Wild and Crazy Guy in 1978; it went gold in six days and double platinum by February 2007.
The next two years were the peak: Saturday Night Live in December 2005 and again for the season-32 premiere, a Rolling Stone "Hottest Comic" anointment already on his résumé, the Vicious Circle special on HBO that September, a first lead role in Employee of the Month, then Good Luck Chuck and Dan in Real Life in 2007. On November 12, 2007, he became the second comic to sell out Madison Square Garden's main arena, after Andrew Dice Clay in 1990, and did it twice in one night. The backlash came with the fame: Joe Rogan said Cook had performed one of his bits, and three Retaliation tracks were compared online to material from Louis C.K.'s 2001 album Live in Houston. Cook and Rogan made peace on Rogan's podcast in August 2010.
Then the story turned. In 2008 Cook discovered that his half-brother and business manager, Darryl McCauley, and McCauley's wife had embezzled at least $12 million; both pleaded guilty in 2010, and Darryl was sentenced to six years in prison. One odd afterlife: the Retaliation sketch "The Friend Nobody Likes" is one of the earliest proposed origins of "Karen" as an internet meme.
Similar items
MySpace
MySpace launched in August 2003 and became the social network that swallowed the mid-2000s internet — where everyone's first friend was Tom. Top 8 rankings sparked drama, profile songs played on auto-load, and DIY HTML customization meant glitter graphics and autoplay music ruled. Bands broke careers there; it was the most-visited website in the US by 2006.
Chappelle's Show
The sketch show that owned the mid-2000s. Dave Chappelle's Comedy Central juggernaut turned razor-sharp racial satire and absurd characters into the most-quoted comedy of the decade — "I'm Rick James, b****!" echoing down every school hallway.
Jessica Simpson
The third lane of the late-90s teen-pop trinity—Britney, Christina, and Jessica Simpson, marketed above all on that big Texas church-choir voice. Her debut album was a platinum hit, but her real dominance came via a reality TV show that turned her marriage into ratings gold and a Chicken of the Sea moment into the decade's defining soundbite.
Jim Carrey
The Canadian comic who became the biggest movie star on the planet in a single calendar year. In 1994, Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber made Jim Carrey the hyperkinetic face of the decade — rubber-faced, fearless, and everywhere.