It’s 7:55 a.m. in California, but Dane Cook’s enthusiastic greeting would insinuate that that he’s been up for hours. In fact, he’s even five minutes early calling in for our interview.

“When you’re a comedian,” he quips, “people usually think, ‘Ah, he must get up at the crack of noon every day.’ But I actually get a lot of work done when I get up early.”

And when you have as much to do as Cook, who is currently traveling the country in the second phase of his ISolated INcident Global Thermo Comedy Tour, getting up early is a necessity. After all, you don’t become the most successful comedian in 30 years by sleeping in.

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Dane Cook has reached the kind of stardom usually reserved for rock stars. It's a height that most stand-up comedians never achieve, though not for lack of trying. However, it's the sort of success that hasn't come without its pit falls.

Though Cook's name has become ubiquitous in comedy circles, it wasn't that long ago that he was a comic like many others, trying to figure out the best way to reach people. In the late '90s, he began using the Internet as a tool to spread the word, and as it turned out, that word spread like wildfire.

"I really looked at it as a way to create a grassroots following," Cook says about his first forays into using the Internet as a promotional tool. "You're talking about 1998 that I started spending a lot more time on the computer. At that time, I was watching a lot of documentary stuff on bands in the '70s and how certain bands took over. What I was really learning from it was the hustle factor of, like, getting flyers and what it means to paper the town... The next thing you know, I’m sitting online, saying, 'OK, if I create a Web site and add links to my comedy, maybe I can start reaching out to people.'"

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