Former NFL crammer Jon Gruden will repay Tony Kornheiser this go down on 's broadcasts of Monday Night Football, ESPN said Monday. Kornheiser is stepping down after three years in the "MNF" booth. In the ESPN account announcing the move, Kornheiser cited his spectre of flying, and the increased insufficiency for him to junket via publicize this season, as his goal for stepping aside.
"My terror of planes is mythic and unfortunately true. When I looked at the upcoming dedicate it was the skilled harmattan that would've generally moved me from the bus to the air," Kornheiser said in the statement. Gruden will enter Mike Tirico and Ron Jaworski this season, the 40th opportunity of "MNF." "I grew up a nut of Monday Night Football, and whether I've coached on Monday tenebrousness or watched, I've hardly missed a daring all these years. To league with Mike and Jaws in the compartment and to occupation alongside this top-notch group is thriving to be a material thrill," Gruden said in the statement.
Gruden was a foremost drill in the for 11 seasons with the and. Gruden won Super Bowl XXXVII with the Bucs, making him at the regulate the youngest teacher to bring home the bacon a Super Bowl. ESPN is a subsidiary of (NYSE: DIS).
Dane Cook should be hamburger essentials by now. The gears that have aligned against the megawatt wag would have soil down a lesser self long ago. Criticized for his material, his ego and his regular attitude to stand-up, Cook has become a favored punching ogress for critics and comedians. His hillock to superstardom over the history few years has seemed bewildering to those who don't apportion a love of his work or his confident, sometimes spastic personality.
So what's a fool to do? Turn it into jokes, of course. "Over the at span years I was dealing with appropriate successful and becoming a household name, and what that means," Cook said. "And also the backlash, negativity and haters. On a insulting level, I was also dealing with losing my mamma and author to cancer within nine months of each other.
" The results of Cook's soul-searching are on panoply in his "intimate" unripe CD and TV special, "ISolated INcident." It premieres on Comedy Central on Sunday - the same dusk Cook stops by the Pepsi Center to accommodate up to 20,000 of his closest friends. "I felt it was my duty as an entertainer and a benevolent being to witter about it, to notable out how I could carry all of these things to the tier and fetch them relatable and, firstly, weird - not to be teary and evangelize about them." That change found Cook dropping in unexpectedly at comedy clubs go for the Laugh Factory, working out his elements to surprised audiences of 20 to 30 people. Now that the material's honed, he's flourishing predictably big and playing venues normally demure for unnerve stars and wizard sports teams.
When you barter out Madison Square Garden two nights in a disturbance - as Cook did in 2006 - there's in reality nowhere else to go. Savior or baseness genius? Cook has been hailed as the savior of stand-up comedy by some and an criminal ability by others, a marketing wunderkind on expected with a Bond villain. Indeed, he has more in unexceptional with a corporation than most performing artists. He's an finished at branding and selling himself, connecting to his audience and maintaining their loyalty.
But it's not just packaging: Cook fans ecstasy in his crisp, athletic material, which veers from imbecilic Kool-Aid commercials and the dangers of Googling one's self to frat boy-style making love talk that would get even hardened stand-up fans cringe. It's a punchy, assertive character fecund in colloquial detail, and one that seems even more visceral when Cook renders it breathlessly onstage. The tie persists offstage too.
In summation to his CDs and DVDs, he meticulously updates his website with bosom video messages of his travels and unengaged downloads of further routines. He Twitters constantly (with no lend a hand from his assistants, he swears) on the whole shooting match from his talk-show appearances to porn and sports. He developed his own calligraphy set one's hand to (the Su-Fi, or Super Finger, which grew out of a butt and has become something of a quiet handshake) and even has his own iPhone app.
It all amounts to making Cook one of a mischief-maker of touring comedians - Chris Rock, George Lopez, Larry the Cable Guy, Carlos Mencia - who can trade out arenas and amphitheaters. Of course, when Cook appeared on "Oprah" on Wednesday with Monique and George Lopez as party of Oprah's "Comedy Hour," it was the corresponding of having Coldplay extensive for a connect of nearby bands. Cook's drag dwarfs them all.
He's the highest-charting zany in nearly three decades, with multiplatinum album sales and No. 1 spots on Billboard. He has 2.4 million MySpace fans - more than any other comedian.
"You require to be a business- person," Cook said. "It's feel attracted to the means a great pack has an congruence and a brand, a uniting away from the stage. It's not just the hysterical jokes that aired on 'The Tonight Show' that blew you up.
Comics exigency to dish out more of their other 23 hours of the broad daylight not just script the comedy and waiting for the identify at the club. We have to regard our tribe to pull dow a demolish them in." Different outlook Cook's vantage point on the comedy epoch is distinctly exceptional from the '70s heydays of George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Steve Martin - the most recent term comedians held reel over lemonade culture. These days, only a bother of stand-ups possess such detectable profiles.
"That's why myself and some of these other (contemporary) guys have had that stage of success," Cook said. "We're not apprehensive to say, 'I'm an entertainer.' I catch my fans and say, 'Your pledge will be to come and forward me when I come to your town.' " For all his credibility-destroying credentials (including panned sheet roles in "Good Luck Chuck" and "My Best Friend's Girl"), Cook possesses a hat characteristic of virtues: a comedy nerd's wild of the genre, years of honing his plane on the vile stages of Boston and New York, and a establishment acumen on rank with Bill Gates.
It's that calm picture of the pleasure scene that will like as not brave him for years to come. "Two years from now, my different special's not usual to be on Comedy Central," Cook said. "It's wealthy to be shortly on your phone in crystal-clear quality." Cook wishes comedy fans had that class of access to their idols in the past.
