‘Comedy is my mistress, and I’m having dalliances with her every night,” confesses Dane Cook as he prepares to play the New York Comedy Festival, which starts tomorrow. “I can be silly, irreverent, vulgar, lewd, lascivious, salacious, but I can also be quirky and jokey and a little corny. It’s a nice smorgasbord.”
It’s also a nice description of this year’s festival.
From Ricky Gervais at Carnegie Hall to the star-studded Stand-Up for Heroes benefit at Town Hall featuring Stephen Colbert and Bruce Springsteen, this year’s sixth incarnation of the festival is bigger, brighter and, in its own twisted way, darker than ever.
To get every aspect of the funny happening at the festival, The Post spoke to four of the biggest names. Cook, Tracy Morgan, Patton Oswalt and Artie Lange dished about everything from the difficulties of quitting heroin to the difficulties of keeping up with the Kardashians.
Complains Lange, who’s been in the spotlight recently for comically hijacking talk show after talk show (and for being sober for the first time in months), now is not the time to be happy.
Funny, yes. But happy, no.
“I see the Kardashian sisters, and I’m like what the f – – – are you so happy about? Because of that store they own?” he asks. “You know the reality show with the Kardashians I want to see? What their old man did with that bag O.J. gave him with the knife in it. That’s what
I’d want to see.”
Surprisingly, Mr. Positivity himself (that would be Cook) is also taking a dark turn in his material, dealing with subject matter as LOL-averse as rape and even suicide. One of the bits involves Cook trying to get inside the mind of someone wanting to kill himself and realizing, “A suicide note written by somebody who is not suicidal is called . . . an autobiography.”
Each performer interviewed pointed to a personal tragedy in his life lending itself to laughs.
In fact, two of the headliners — Morgan and Lange — speak openly about the hardships that formed their comedic perspectives. For Morgan, he’s estranged from his mother. For Lange, his father became paralyzed years before his death, which caused Lange to become deeply depressed and miss work recently on Howard Stern’s show.
Today, he says it’s his Upper East Side shrink and his 25-year-old girlfriend who keep him saner and cleaner than he’s ever been.
“I’m famous on ‘Stern’ for saying ‘waaah’ about stuff, ‘get over it,’ and the irony is I’m the king of that,” Lange says. “I’m 42. I’m the same age Elvis was when he died. I remember thinking when I was 33, I’m the same age Jesus was when he died. Look at all Jesus did by 33. He died for all our sins, and all I did was tell some Mexican jokes at a club.”
Cheer up, Lange. Fellow comic Morgan is also coming from the darkest of places to get to the lightest of comedy. Morgan even admits that his days on “Saturday Night Live” turned him into a “social alcoholic,” saying, “The alcoholic part of me, I bury every day. I don’t know about tomorrow, but I know today: I don’t want to drink. I don’t focus on what I don’t want. I focus on what I want.”
Or as his alter ego Tracy Jordan from “30 Rock” might say: “Live every week like it’s Shark Week.”
Another alternative? Live every week like you’re Cook. Playing Madison Square Garden for the fourth time, the comedian looks at the vicious nature of haters as being part of the adventure.
“I was the one who said when I was 15 years old to the universe, ‘Bring it on. I want the whole ride. I want the whole scary volcanic magma raining down on me: good, bad, ugly, up, down.’ ”
Speaking of volcanic magma, does fellow comic Patton Oswalt still want to die in the Apocalypse? (His famous bit goes: “If the Apocalypse happens, that’s how I want to die, because that’s the way to go . . . Everyone else in heaven, can you imagine how boring their stories are? ‘How’d you die man?’ ‘In a bus accident.’ ‘Fire ants.’ How’d I die? In the motherf – – – ing Apocalypse. It was awesome!”)
Says Oswalt, “I don’t think there’s an Apocalypse
coming . . . What’s most frightening is that we just adjust. Instead of going, ‘Oh this is horrible, we’ve got to turn it back,’ we just adjust and just keep going on as if nothing’s happened.”
With multiple stand-up albums to his name and a slew of acting and comedy credits, Oswalt brings his pop-culture obsessions into almost every role he performs. He has a reputation as a strong “punch-up” writer in Hollywood when brought in to make scripts funnier, but in his latest recurring role on Diablo Cody’s Showtime series “The United States of Tara,” Oswalt says he rarely does heavy improvisation.
“I’m given really good scripts,” he says.
“So it’s not like I’m looking at the script saying, ‘Well, I’m just going to improve on this . . .’ ”
Of course, sometimes doing terrible things is half the fun.
As Lange explains, there’s an exercise many comics do in which, right out of the gate, they alienate the crowd to see if it’s possible to win back the audience. In his personal life, Lange talks openly about battling a four-year heroin addiction. His book “Too Fat To Fish” chronicles his darkest days.
It’s almost as if he’s been playing that Digging a Hole exercise in his life, as well.
Ultimately, he says it is New York — an inspiration for many comics — that helps him keep reaching upward.
“Listen, it’s the capital of comedy,” he says.
“In New York, you can make your own comedy just by opening the door. You can’t do that in Burbank. You’ve got to hope that Jennifer Love Hewitt has a good anecdote about ‘The Ghost Whisperer.’ New York keeps that edge. It keeps you funny.”
mstadtmiller@nypost.com