[movieperson id="236634"]Dane Cook[/movieperson] isn't scared of going there in his comedy routine. (Remember the [article id="1617974"]colorful remarks he made about Vanessa Hudgens'[/article] nude photos at the Teen Choice Awards this summer?) Cook is currently on his ISolated INcident Global Thermo Comedy Tour and he is once again making light of serious situations -- this time the joke's on him.

"I think this set is interesting. I wanted this idea of real dark hard-core material and then some really light kind of more observational [stuff]," he told MTV News. "But everything more from a real vulnerable standpoint. It's really personal. I lost my mom and dad to cancer within nine months of each other. Believe it or not, there was a lot of humor there. My folks were funny people."

He said that being able to get onstage night after night and tell their story in a humorous way has been "cathartic" -- and it was something they approved of, even in their final days. "If you knew my folks, you knew they were very brave and funny people and even when they were very ill they were almost helping me to cultivate certain material," he explained, adding you can't be "afraid" to make the jokes. "It was very difficult at first of course ... but the more feedback I got from fans ... it gave me a boost of confidence to bring it out and share it in front of the larger-capacity crowd."

As for the rest of the show, he says that aside from all the personal family issues, he wanted to make sure the set was a nice mix of material. "I created an entirely new hour of material, worked on it back in L.A. -- in the lab, as we lovingly call it -- now it's a brand-new hour. It's me really just replanting the comedy flag and letting people know that even though movies and TV came along that I love stand-up comedy," he explained. "I want to be the heavyweight comedy champion of the world."

One of the highlights of the tour will be Cook's New York stop. He'll play the Madison Square Garden as a part of the New York Comedy Festival on Thursday (November 5) and is jazzed about the opportunity. "The comedy festival is obviously one of the biggest collections of my favorite comedians in the best comedy city in the world," he said. "And the fact that my tour could come through and be part of the festival is like two giant comedy supernovas coming together. It's a big tour and a big festival."