As a magazine columnist reported: "Engagements in small-time vaudeville, amusement parks, and tent shows followed rapidly.

He could quietly, unsmilingly go through an incredible act of wire-walking, juggling, fiddling, or master yarn-spinning and bring down the house.

"[3] He combined his nonsensical comedy storytelling, complex inventions to perform absurdly simple or useless tasks, and playing piano, violin, and ukulele.

Joe Cook had enjoyed a very successful career in vaudeville (with three years in blackface)[4] when his brother Leo died.

Cook often teamed with stooge and future restaurateur Dave Chasen, in such shows as Rain or Shine, Fine and Dandy—the first hit completely scored by a woman (Kay Swift)[5]—and Hold Your Horses.

Corey Ford, the co-author of the last-named musical, wrote: "When I first saw Joe Cook in 1923, he was co-starring in Earl Carroll's Vanities with Peggy Hopkins Joyce, whom he used to refer to as 'that somewhat different virgin making her professional debut'.

I sat on the balcony and marveled at the bland deadpan expression, the slightly curved mouth, the easy flow of nonsense patter as he walked a tightrope or juggled Indian clubs while explaining to the audience why he would not imitate four Hawaiians.

In 1930, Columbia Pictures hired him to star in the film version of Rain or Shine, which was directed by a young Frank Capra.

Cook's only other feature film, Arizona Mahoney (1936), is a western based on a Zane Grey story; the supporting cast included a young Larry "Buster" Crabbe.

[8] One visitor, his librettist Donald Ogden Stewart, later recalled that "Joe lived on a mad gag-infested estate in New Jersey which bewilderingly expressed his genius.

On his three-hole golf course one drove off confidently into what looked like a fairway only to have one's ball rebound sharply over one's head from a huge rock that had been cunningly camouflaged.

"[9] A 1935 report, however, refutes the calculated craziness of the Cook domicile: "When Earl Carroll motored out to Lake Hopatcong, where Joe lives, he expected to talk into a telephone that squirted water in his face.