Dane Cook's dualities revealed in 'ISolated Incident'

On a Sunset Strip balcony, sitting beside an azure pool, Dane Cook makes the confession that America has been waiting for during his two decades as a comic. "Can I just admit to you, you're right," the 37-year-old said, holding his palms up to the sky. "Look . . . I'm not funny. I'm OK with that. I'm cool with that."

Cook is, of course, joking about his lack of humor, which, if you think about it, is kind of funny -- or maybe it's not funny at all. This is the sort of paradox that swirls around the wildly successful touring comic who, more than anyone else on the comedy scene today, can polarize a cocktail party conversation.

Sunday night, Comedy Central will air Cook's new stand-up special, "ISolated INcident," which be released as an audio album Tuesday and as a DVD later this year. Cook is on tour right now, with three shows in Las Vegas next weekend and a Staples Center appearance on May 30.

Before hitting the road, he sat down a few weeks ago at the Sunset Tower Hotel to talk about comedy, death, success and controversy, as well as technology, which has been a backbeat to his success in a singular fashion.

With half-a-million hits per month on his website, a popular blog and 2.5 million friends on his MySpace page, Cook is hard-wired for the digital age in a way that no other comic can rival.

"He built his career leveraging MySpace, but he now has 300,000 Twitter fans and 500,000 Facebook fans, and that's gone up 200,000 in recent weeks," said Adam Zbar, chief executive of Zannel, which partnered with Cook on his own iPhone application. "He's is the digital-age comedian with the largest online footprint of anyone in comedy."

That's a major reason he sells out arenas with startling ease and racks up box-office numbers that are more like Bruce Springsteen than Lenny Bruce; in 2005, for example, he played two shows at Boston Gardens, his hometown, with a combined audience of 38,000. (He is also the first comedian to sell out Staples.) "I've embraced this technology; it's the thing that built my career, but it's also going to be the thing that capsizes me every once in a while," said Cook, who is attacked with venom and glee across the Internet as unfunny, a joke thief and a star only frat boys could love. "I respond directly to some of it, or I have in the past, but if you do that, well, that's one day a week you have to set aside, a B.S. day."