Why Dane Cook is a 21st Century Pauly Shore

When I first saw Dane Cook, I laughed my ass off. It was pretty early in the comedian's career, and I was pretty delighted when Cook started to get successful, selling comedy CDs that revitalized the genre and hosting Saturday Night Live.

Then, he started coming out with movies, and after the terrible Employee of the Month, I started to hear people turn against him. "He's so frat boy," they'd say, "All of his jokes are retarded." And I knew what was happening to him. Dane Cook is about to go through a comedy meltdown, and it's happened before.

Remember how much everyone used to love Pauly Shore?

You have to think back really, really hard, but there was a time when America loved the guy. He had dozens of hit movies, millions of dollars, and countless legions of teenagers quoting every one of his semi-brainless catchphrases.

Yes, Pauly Shore was at the apex of comedy, in a position that most comedians can only dream of. Then, suddenly, everything turned against him.

There was no specific reason for it; he was basically doing the same bit that he'd always done, the stoner-idiot guy with the cheap physical gags. But for some reason, it just stopped working, and people got violent against him. Everyone got on the Pauly-Shore-Hate-Train, and he went from A-list to a few rungs below Ernest (kids, ask your parents if you don't know who Ernest is).

Comedy's a tough place; someone who's funny one minute is brutally despised the next, and it's pretty unfair. Maybe Shore was too blunt of a comedian, maybe it was that he was disposable; more than anything, it was probably that his jokes were too one dimensional. But there are one dimensional comedians that go for dozens of years doing the same tired act. For some reason or another, success wasn't sustainable for Pauly Shore, and now it's not sustainable for Dane Cook.