Competitive nature keeps comedian Kelsey Cook sharp

The last time Spokane-raised comedian Kelsey Cook was in town from Minnesota, she became engaged after a surprise proposal from her now-fiancé, fellow comedian Chad Daniels.

While three shows at the Spokane Comedy Club, Thursday through April 11, might not be as exciting as that, she’s still looking forward to being back in her old stomping grounds for, if anything, the food.

“I spend my life flying to other cities to perform, and I have been all over, and I still think that Spokane has some of the best food in the country,” she said. “I love going to the Elk. I love going to Wooden City and Wild Sage and Umi (Kitchen and Sushi Bar), any of the Kendall Yards places.”

The first and only other time I interviewed Cook, she had recently performed in Paris for the first time, was regularly opening for comedian Jim Norton and was preparing to make her “Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” debut.

Looking back at that time, Cook, who began performing comedy while a student at Washington State University, remembers feeling like it was an exciting time and there were lots of possibilities to continue making her own way in the world of comedy.

With that “Tonight Show” credit on her resume, she knew she was likely to receive offers to headline shows and was hopeful people would feel like they knew her more after her TV appearance.

Fallon, by the way, is just as kind as people think he is, Cook said, and she enjoyed chatting with the Roots drummer Questlove, who would later request songs for the “Trumpet Tuesday” videos Cook made with her father, Spokane Symphony trumpet player Chris Cook, during the pandemic that found Chris Cook covering hip-hop, rap and pop songs on the trumpet.

In short, Cook had every right to be excited about her future career, as things really began taking off for her around that time.

She’s since gone back to the “Tonight Show” multiple times and has appeared on shows like “This Is Not Happening” and “After Midnight.” She also began headlining her own tours and has released two specials, “The Hustler” and “Mark Your Territory,” which have a combined almost 6 million views on YouTube and are available on Hulu.

After the success of “The Hustler,” which Cook released in 2023, Cook found that she could bring people along into the next chapter of her life while writing “Mark Your Territory.”

That next chapter included her then-new relationship with Daniels, relocating to Minnesota and the experience of helping her mother after she was diagnosed with dementia.

Cook kept the diagnosis out of her comedy for the first couple years, noting that, put simply, the internet is a weird place and her job is strange.

“People come out to the shows and follow me online know me, or this online version of me, but I don’t know them,” she said. “My mom is my whole world, and I’m fiercely protective of her, and I really wanted to make sure that if I was going to open up about that that it felt like it would be in a respectful way.”

Cook said she decided to open up more about her mother’s diagnosis because she started to struggle as a caregiver, especially as she and her mother are still young, with Cook saying the experience can be incredibly isolating.

She began by talking about her mother on her podcast with Daniels, “Pretend Problems,” and got an overwhelmingly positive response and lots of supportive comments from people experiencing the same or similar things with their own family members.

Cook started incorporating stories about her mother’s diagnosis into her live shows and received similar words of support from audience members, some of whom were students of Cook’s mother when she taught French and German at Cheney High School.

“Whenever I talk about my mom on stage, I get to feel that she’s there too,” Cook said. “She’s always been my biggest fan. Before her diagnosis, after she retired, she was going to come to a bunch of shows on the road with me, so you’re mourning so many things. One of them is the life that you thought you were going to have with them, so really, I love talking about her on stage.”

Aside from stories about her mother’s diagnosis, Cook is no stranger to sharing personal stories onstage. Her latest special, “Mark Your Territory,” for example, featured a story about the first time Cook got her period, which happened to coincide with her class’s end-of-the-year trip to the lake.

You can probably figure out the rest.

Cook said when things like that happen, her mind switches from “That was embarrassing” to “That would make for a good joke” pretty quickly, with that switch happening even faster the longer she does comedy.

“When I was younger, there are certain things I could never even imagine talking about on stage because I was so embarrassed,” she said. “Then the older you get, it’s like therapy. It’s pretty great when you’re like ‘Well, this sucked, but now it’s on Hulu.’ It’s a good way to turn it around.”

Cook’s keeping the stories coming in her third special, which she recorded in October and hopes to release in the near future. The special features a mix of light-hearted material and some heavier moments, everything from her mother’s situation, depression and quitting drinking to “a bodily function mishap on an airplane.”

Cook is now touring on her “Reasonable Bedtime” tour, aptly named because she scheduled the shows so that audience members won’t be out all night. The tour is currently booked through June with plans to add more shows in the second half of the year.

Cook, a World Champion foosball player like her mother, is competitive in most areas of her life, including comedy. But with comedy, she tries to keep the competition within herself, working as hard as she can to make her material as strong as it can be.

There are a lot of opportunities to compare yourself to other comics, Cook said, mentioning follower counts and ticket sales, but she prefers to think of a line from “Desiderata,” a poem by Max Ehrmann.

“If you compare yourself with others,/you may become vain and bitter;/for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.”

“My thing I focus on is ‘Am I improving? Have I gotten better than I was a year ago? Is there a way to make these jokes I’m currently doing stronger?’ ” she said. “I’m very competitive with myself.”