“My girlfriend and I, we get a lot of crap from people because we have an age difference,” Cook said. “I’m 46, and she’s 20.”

The Arlington native stopped by “ Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Thursday to promote his upcoming tour. While he was there, he hit back at some of the online critics of his relationship with 20-year-old Kelsi Taylor , whom the comedian has dated for “almost two years in bliss.”

Dane Cook has been doing stand-up comedy for longer than his girlfriend has been alive, and he’s not afraid to talk about it.

Cook then chastised some of the people uncomfortably snickering in the crowd, saying, “I’m sure that wasn’t judgment at all,” before throwing out a few jokes of his own.


“Sometimes I actually find myself saying, ‘Where has she been all my life?’ ” Cook said. “And then I realize she wasn’t alive for the first 26 years of it.”

Cook clearly has heard plenty of jokes at his expense.

“People are like, ‘You’re robbing the cradle,” Cook said. “I was like, ‘She hasn’t slept in a cradle for, like, nine years. Relax.’”

Cook also told Kimmel that he was present when Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen met for the first time. Cook said he was in San Diego watching the Patriots play the Chargers and was sitting with both Bundchen and the Kraft family. Afterward, they went to the Patriots locker room.

“She’s beautiful, but then he’s beautiful, and when they got together, we all just felt so ugly at that moment,” Cook said. “They were like White Walkers — they just drained us of all our life energy and beauty.”

After reaching the top echelons of stand-up fame in the early 2000s, Cook has flown under the radar in recent years. But he told Kimmel that after 29 years of performing stand-up, he hopes to change that with the Tell It Like It Is tour, which kicks off Feb. 20, and stops in Boston at the Boch Center Wang Theatre on Saturday, March 9.


“Took a little time just to play every video game possible, and then I got bored and realized, you know what, I gotta pay my mortgage,” Cook said. “But really, honestly, I put together some of the most dynamic, introspective, and yet still observational humor and worked on it out here in LA for the last couple of years, and now I’m bringing it to the masses.”

Kevin Slane can be reached at kevin.slane@globe.com.