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One Comic’s Identity Crisis

From left, Dane Cook, Joy Osmanski and Collette Wolfe in the pilot of the series “Next Caller,” which NBC did not broadcast.Credit...Justin Lubin/NBC

In his first television special Dane Cook charged onstage wearing a black tank top and crouched like a giant frog aiming to catch a fly. “I think every comic wants to be a rock ’n’ roll star,” he said in that 2000 show. “I do. That’s my dream.”

Seven years later it came true. Running around a stage at Madison Square Garden was a new version of Mr. Cook. Gone was the clownish, Jim Carrey-like physicality, replaced by a preening strut. “This is like a party here tonight, you feel it, right?” he shouted. They did.

Watching his young crowd roar in laughter at jokes that, to put it generously, varied in quality, makes you understand why Steve Martin soured on comedy after playing arenas. In an environment that resembles a boy-band concert, how can a comic know what’s working? If they laugh at everything, is it still funny?

How Dane Cook, now 40, became one of the biggest names in stand-up (with almost three million Twitter followers) is only slightly less baffling than how he has become one of the most reviled. A moderately talented, hard-working performer with an obnoxious streak, he has an ordinary frat-boy exterior that hides an energetic juggernaut of ambition and drive.

Mr. Cook may have been the first Internet-age comic. He pioneered the exploitation of social media to build a career, consistently responding to fans on MySpace when that service mattered. “It was unheard-of then to use it like he did,” said Patrick Milligan, who helps run the club the Stand, near Gramercy Park.

While the Internet can build popularity quickly, it can also accelerate a backlash. When Mr. Cook made a joke about the Aurora, Colo., shootings, it went viral, and he was forced to apologize. When he performed new material earlier in 2012, T. J. Miller, a comic on the same bill at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles, tweeted criticism. The media picked it up, leading each comic to argue his case on podcasts.

In certain comedy and media circles, contempt for Mr. Cook is knee-jerk, even cliché. At Joe’s Pub in the East Village, I once saw Benjamin Walker, an actor who dabbles in comedy, announce that he didn’t want to be like Mr. Cook. Hating Dane Cook is a kind of credential-building shorthand. Andrew Dice Clay was once even more controversial. But unlike Mr. Cook, he emerged before the Internet, and his persona has remained relatively constant. His New Year’s Eve Showtime special shows him to be basically the same proudly crass, nursery-rhyming comic who rocketed to fame in the 1990s.

Mr. Cook, by contrast, evolves. His early material was exuberantly silly. He did a long bit about wanting to be a snake. He showed traces of self-deprecation. His best album, from 2003, is “Harmful if Swallowed,” and it included jokes about working at Burger King, which in an attempt to make a terrible job sound better he referred to as “the BK Lounge.”

In some of the loosely organized stories on his next album, “Retaliation,” he captured the amusing ways that a thin-skinned guy avoids honesty. There were even hints of vulnerability in the manner of Martin Lawrence. But Mr. Cook’s macho persona also resorted to cheap laughs through dumb sexual boasts and imagined violence. He was never self-aware enough to be insightful, but his committed, relentlessly upbeat charisma and ambition had a certain brute force.

As he grew more famous, the vulnerability faded, and his persona turned smug. This hurt him more than it would other comics because the strength of his act lies in his force of personality, not carefully wrought jokes. Once he started chuckling over the imagined prospect of harming a girl he had gotten pregnant, part of his appeal evaporated. Boy bands carefully protect their images for a reason.

He starred in some brutally reviewed movies like “Good Luck Chuck.” Accusations of joke stealing emerged. These dogged him and became the subject of a scene in the television series “Louie.” Louis C. K., who wrote the episode, asks a grumpy Mr. Cook for a favor, which leads to an argument over whether Mr. Cook stole his jokes. Mr. Cook says he didn’t. Louis C. K. says that he believes he did, albeit unintentionally.

The scene is less balanced than it appears. The controversy focused on three jokes. At worst, Mr. Cook used similar premises to create markedly different bits from Louis C. K.’s. If employing the same premise is the standard for theft, countless comics would be guilty.

But comparing these jokes makes you realize that the premises make less of an impact than what is done with them. One of the jokes in question marvels at how parents could name their children anything. Mr. Cook thinks of naming his kid after the transformer Optimus Prime, while Louis C. K. takes a more imaginative tack, proposing the expression “Ladies and gentleman,” so, when exasperated, he could say, “Ladies and gentleman, please!”

Mr. Cook’s last album of new material, the 2009 “Isolated Incident,” introduced another persona that’s more sober, confessional. He begins with a rare topical joke about President Obama’s name. Where he once did a bit about talking a woman into sex even though he didn’t have a condom, he now jokes about turning down sex because there’s no birth control. In the Comedy Central special based on this album, he enters the stage quietly, the camera behind him, through an unglamorous backstage.

Other comics are as desperate for success as Mr. Cook, but they hide it better. He didn’t just wear that black tank top; at the end of his 2000 special he ripped it off, raising his hands in triumph. Inevitably, Mr. Cook has tried to leverage his toxic reputation by playing jerks, but it’s not so easy. He was an obnoxious D.J. in a pilot of the sitcom “Next Caller,” but NBC chose not to broadcast the show in October, even though several episodes had been filmed.

The previous year he was to play a sexist cad in Neil LaBute’s “Fat Pig” on Broadway, but the financing fell apart. Last month he was given another chance at television: NBC signed a new deal with him. But tellingly, the only role that has worked out for him lately is that of a Nazi.

Playing that goose-stepping playwright, Franz Liebkind, in a short run of “The Producers” in Los Angeles last summer, Mr. Cook was surprisingly good, better than Will Ferrell in the movie version. His singing was solid, and his jittery clowning loose-limbed and aptly silly. His well-reviewed turn was a reminder of his early stand-up: goofy, brazenly broad, selling it.

It’s a performance that made you believe that there’s one way that Mr. Cook has not changed. More than anything, he still wants to be a rock star.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: One Comic’s Identity Crisis. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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