Less than a week after the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting that killed 12 people and injured 70 others, Dane Cook hit the stage at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles to share his thoughts on The Dark Knight Rises, the film that was being shown the night of the massacre.
“So I heard that the guy came into the theater about 25 minutes into the movie,” Cook began his joke. “And I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie; the movie’s pretty much a piece of crap,” he continued. “And I know that if, you know, none of that had happened, I’m pretty sure that somebody in that theater, about 25 minutes in, realizing it was a piece of crap, probably was like, ‘Oh, f—king shoot me.’”
Groans from the audience were quickly drowned out by laughter and applause, but once that audio hit the internet, Cook swiftly felt the backlash from everyone who wasn’t in attendance. And before long, Cook’s fellow comedians were also weighing in on the controversy. Sinbad, for example, expressed his belief that you can talk about anything in comedy depending on how you approach the subject matter. Russell Brand shared similar sentiments at the time, stating that nothing should be off-limits.
Dane Cook’s Aurora Shooting Joke Became One of His Most Controversial Stand-Up Moments
Surprisingly, it was Cook’s future Planes co-star Brad Garrett who was the most critical of the offending joke, telling ABC News Radio that Cook “absolutely” crossed the line. Garrett went on to say that Cook’s words were in “super poor taste.” “To me, that’s definitely below the belt because…there’s nothing about [the situation] that could possibly be [seen as] humor,” Garrett concluded. However, Cook had already beaten Garrett to the punch a few days earlier.
The day the audio from Cook’s set started making the rounds, Cook took to Twitter to issue an apology, saying that he was devastated by what happened in Aurora and didn’t mean to make light of the incident. “I made a bad judgment call with my material last night & regret making a joke at such a sensitive time,” the comedian wrote. “My heart goes out to all the families & friends of the victims.”
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