Watch or listen to the stand-up comedy special 'Above it All' (2022) by Dane Cook on Comedy Buff. Transcript available. Tracks include: Justice, My Stalker, I Love You, 20/20 aka The Photo, and The Rathskeller.

Dane Cook

Above it All

I love crime. I love it. I can't stop with the Citizen app. I'm always on the Citizen app. Citizen app for anybody who doesn't know. So the Citizen app, you can download it, and then it knows your GPS coordinates, knows where you're at. And from time to time, it'll send you updates, but they're not delightful. The updates are quite nefarious, right? And not only did they send an update, they send how far away whatever is happening is happening.
A couple of nights ago, I'm sitting watching TV. I get an update. I look down 0.04 miles away. Woman brandishing dagger. Let's talk about this for a second. First of all, what the fuck is brandishing? I feel like it's like threatening, but with dance involved, right? I'm brandishing and we'll kill you. 0.04 miles away, I was like, fuck, I could probably get down there. I love it. They were doing the updates, and it was on the news too.
Did you see the smash and grab gang? You saw them, right? There was 20 of them. They all had hammers, and apparently they all got together, and they were like, hey, let's just rob everything all the time. And so it started a few months ago. The first thing that they did is they took their hammers, and they went to, I think the first place that they hit was Nordstrom's, right? And you saw the footage.
They all ran up, and they smashed the plate glass window, and then you see them all. They just run through the store, and they're grabbing everything that they can, and then they, by the way, never even try anything on, right? They're just so brazen. Imagine you get home, and you're like, nothing fits me. I ran through the kids' aisle. Fuck! I can't believe this. I've always loved, I just, I'm fascinated with criminals and crime.
It's always been the stuff that I'm most interested in. Like, you can't not watch Dateline. Dateline to this day, is there anything better than a brand new episode of Dateline? I don't think there is. Right? When you're sitting down, and you start, first of all, Dateline, even if you're not planning on watching Dateline, you're going to end up watching Dateline. Okay, because there's a couple of things at Dateline, very crafty, that Dateline knows how to do.
First of all, when the show starts, the moment Dateline begins, coming out of whatever commercial, they show blood right away. Right? They show, they show smears of blood, they show flashes of blood, splats of blood, and then the narrator jumps in almost as quickly. There was blood everywhere! Blood on the walls, blood on the floors, blood on the family dog. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, blood on the dog.
Wait a second. Hold up. Did the killer pet the dog? Did the dog kill people? Wait. And then what do they do next? They pull you in a little bit more by giving you a tidbit of the salacious hour you're about to experience, right? They were just married three hours before. And you're like, oh shit, this is serious. And then they give the entire episode a title. And the title's fucked up, but perfect.
Tonight, I do, no, I do want to kill you. Here's Lester Holt. I love crime. Oh my goodness. I've watched so many thousands of hours courtroom dramas. I think I know how to represent myself in a court of law and get away with it. Absolutely. So come along with me. Let's talk about that next. Here we go. First. Okay, listen. It's not about guilt. It's not about innocent. It's not about facts. It's not about yes or no or what was right and wrong.
None of that matters. Okay? The whole deal of winning in court is charisma. That's the whole thing. It's all about charisma. I'm telling you right now. That's all you need to do if you want to win the case. And there's a couple things that you could do to instantly get that jury because you just need one person, one person in that jury pool to think you're a cool shit. If you can't get one person to think that you're somebody they want to hang with, well, you should go to fucking jail.
One person needs to come up with some reasonable doubt. Okay? That's what we're looking for here. And this is how you're going to get it. Ready? Very, very simple. This is what you do. You start off like this. First day. You're going to win the first day. Okay? You're going to dress up, gussy up real nice. And then you're going to, you're going to, this is, juries love this. Ready? You're going to pace back and forth like this.
Juries love this. Ready? Right? You see this little thing that I'm doing with my finger? This is a little pantomime here. You're going to do this. If you ever represent yourself in a court, do this. Pretend there's a tiny little kitten on the end of your digit and you're petting it. And all you're going to do, ready? Very sincerely, you're just going to greet them. That's all. You're just going to greet the jury.
You're just going to look at everybody. Hello. Good morning. Good morning. Hi. Good morning. Right away, somebody's sitting there going, he wished me good morning. That made me feel really nice. I believe in this person. Now, if you're feeling already like, oh wow, okay, I'm starting to feel a genuine connection with this jury, then you might want to go, again, don't push it, but you might want to go with this next.
You might want to go with, is anybody celebrating a birthday today? Next week, happy birthday. Who doesn't love to be wished happy birthday? Happy birthday? Wish me happy birthday. This guy didn't kill somebody. He cared about my birthday greeting. This will work, absolutely, except for one condition. It will not work if you're fucking ugly. If you're ugly, you are going to jail. Ugly people are guilty.
If you have a cleft lip, you're done. You're going to jail. But if you look good, that's innocence right there. There's certain things that juries just really love. Here's something else that they love. They love when you point at them gently. Okay? You're going to point at them gently. And then follow your own hand out. And then you're just going to ask a very obvious question about America. Juries love this.
Just like this. You're going to go, Do you want to live in an America where Chick-fil-A is closed on Sundays? Because I sure don't. Justice. Justice. They can't hire some atheists to work the drive-thru on a Sunday? Come on! Justice! Justice! Justice! So I've been dealing with a stalker. And this is legit, okay? I cannot even fathom how I found myself in this situation, but I did. I started getting, about a year ago, thousands of DMs on Instagram.
You know, DMs, they're direct messages. It's like text that you can send to whoever allows them to be accessed. And I always keep it open to my fans, and people write me stuff all the time. I love it. Throw back a hello or whatever. Every once in a while, I get stuff that's a little off-kilter. Somebody has a bleached asshole picture, and they send it to me, thinking maybe that's what I'm in the mood for.
But I noticed, about a year ago, that I started getting thousands of messages from this one woman's account. And when I really investigated, I was like, oh, wow. I remember I was sitting there, I was like, oh, she has sent me a message every minute of every day. Every minute. I would look. 10.42 a.m. Where you at, baby? 10.43 a.m. Been looking all over for you, baby. You know, baby with like 15 A's.
That's babby, by the way. But fuck it. That's not... And so I would look, and then finally it was like, you know, like 4.14 a.m. She would be, where the fuck are you, Dane Cook? I'm looking for Dane Cook. And they got increasingly more and more off kilter. Strange. So over the course of a couple of weeks, they got, then they were like all capital letters. And then it just turned into like, I couldn't even really make out what she was getting at.
And it just kept going on, like rambles and rambles. And I was sitting at lunch with a friend, and I finally said, you got to see all these every minute. And my buddy goes, she sent a video. And when I looked at her, she sent me a video. And I was like, I got to know. You know, sometimes when you hit play on a video before it catches the Wi-Fi, there's that moment where it's got to find the signal.
So whatever the video is, it's just frozen on one still. It was her face, and she was like this. And it just stayed like that for a second. And I want to be, again, really straightforward about how I felt, about everything that I experienced. When I saw this video, and I saw her face, she was very, very ugly. She had a horribly ugly fucking face. She looked like a rock with makeup on. And the video plays, and she's screaming and pacing.
She goes, where the fuck are you, Dane Cook? I want to know where Dane Cook is, and why the fuck you won't call me back? You didn't fucking call me back, Dane Cook. She's seething. She's spitting onto the camera. It's so fucking loud, screaming, wherever she was. I know people must have been. And she's like, you don't fucking call me. And then it ends. I'm sitting there. I was like, I never had anybody yell at me like this my whole life.
I never had anybody yell at me and scream at me like that. It was so unsettling. And as I was trying to really figure out what would have made her so upset, I looked down. She sent me another video. And in the second video, she was crying. She was wiping tears. She goes, this isn't me. This isn't me. This isn't us. She said that. She said, this isn't me. This isn't us. And she just, she was weeping.
And she looked so sad. She looked so downtrodden. And she just, it pulled you into that same level of emotion, right? I found myself, you know what? I'm going to cry a lot so the plane will go by. So it'll be a lot of crying. We're going to watch this. I can just see Marty, my director. He's going like this. And if I stretch, let that fucking aircraft go by. We'll just get some extra crying. We'll cut around.
Trust me. Oh, I did my best. I did my best. That's a callback to Vicious Circle. That's for you, Marty. Okay, the plane's gone. Let's keep going. Here we go. Anyway, shut up. Ready? Do what you were doing before, okay? Get in that same mindset. So, she was very sad. And that, in turn, it made me emotional. So, she was crying so hard that I was almost mirroring, but I didn't know. I was like, I was watching like that.
I'm not crying, but something, you know, I'm like, I'm in it with her. The video ends. Eleven minutes later, she sends me another video. And fuck yes, I'm playing it. I need to know what emotion is next on the seven levels of grief that I'm receiving. When I hit play on the third video, this woman who'd gone from being so irate, over-the-top, furious anger, to then being so despondent and sullen and low, in the third video, she was just staring.
Just staring. Just staring into the camera. Nothing. No emotion. Staring and breathing. And I'm watching and I'm staring. I'm breathing as well. I'm just... And then she did something that I'll never not see. I'll never get this image out of my mind for the rest of my life. She looked a little bit closer into the camera and her eyes went a little wide. And then she ate almonds. Oh, I watched the whole fucking video.
I was transfixed. I actually counted. She put nine almonds. Nine almonds in her mouth. And then she never chewed. Never chewed. I challenge you to go home tonight. Put nine goddamn almonds in your mouth and don't chew. What the fuck, lady? The video ends and I didn't even know where I'm at with this. I'm just like, wow, this is all... This is a very strange individual. But I wasn't scared. Why wasn't I scared?
Because part of me was like, you know, and I was a little concerned. But I was like, ah, she doesn't know where I am. And who knows where she is in the world. And then a week later, I get a video and she's scanning the LA skyline. Scanning the whole skyline. And then she slowly turns to the camera. And she goes, look at it. She goes, getting close. Yeah. And I said to the camera, you fucking are. You are getting close.
I live here. And then 