LOS ANGELES — As a comedian, shooting your shot is a part of everyday life when it comes to moving your career forward. Comedian Kelsey Cook knows it all too well, both as a stand-up and a world champion foosball player. While those two careers couldn’t be any more different, with the skill and determination it takes to do both it’s no wonder she’s been able to score big in multiple facets of life lately.

In addition to getting engaged to her fiancé and fellow comedian Chad Daniels, she’s now celebrating the release of her third special — her first on Netflix — aptly titled “Happy Hour.” The title is about more than enjoying life and knocking one back after work, it’s also about how her life’s obstacles, from depression to the pain of dealing with her mother’s dementia, might knock her down from time to time. But like her tabletop sport of choice, the true skill is knowing how to dust yourself off, rally and win.

Q: I really love the fact that the title of your special is “Happy Hour,” because I think for most comedians, just getting an hour on Netflix is a happy thing.

A: Yeah, I did kind of want it to be a double meaning. I have a joke about happy hour and like not drinking anymore, but I also do feel like overall there’s a lot of joy in the hour and so I kind of like that it could be both.

Q: You did two things with this special that were really important — you financed it yourself and you also shot it in the Twin Cities, where you live currently. Why were both of those things so crucial for you?

A: My previous two specials, they went up on YouTube and were, the first one was financed by a production group, 800 Pound Gorilla, and then the second one, we kind of went in on it together. But both of them ultimately were shot in comedy clubs, went on YouTube, and were licensed to Hulu, but I knew with the third one, I felt strongly about it where I was like, OK, I kind of want to bet on myself here and take the touring revenue I’ve saved up and finance it myself and shoot it in a theater. Because I always feel like when you see Netflix specials, the vast majority of them are in theaters. It’s that kind of more elevated look. I felt like even if this doesn’t get picked up by Netflix, I wanted to be able to put it on my YouTube because the previous two specials had been hosted on the production company’s YouTube. I felt I was in a place I felt ready to have more ownership of it and make that bet and I’m really glad it paid off.

Q: There’s an important aspect of specials, the business side of it, that I don’t think enough comics really get to learn until they’re confronted with it.

A: It’s kind of trial by fire where you’re like, “All right, I’ve never done this before.” But this is my 17th year in comedy and I do think you start to get to a point where you were like asking, “How much longer am I gonna wait before I fully just like go all in on myself and and try it.” Then shooting it in the Twin Cities where I live now — I moved there three and a half years ago — and the Minneapolis comedy scene and the comedy fans there are so good and so supportive and I feel like they kind of took me in as one of their own once I moved there. It’s been so cool and my fiancé, Chad Daniels, who is also a comedian, shot his Netflix special at the Fitzgerald Theater, the same place I shot mine. So it also felt like, all right, he had a great experience there. We had the same director and it was like let’s remove as many variables as we can, since shooting a special is already kind of like a wild, weird experience.

Q: A his-and-hers special experience. That’s cool.

A: Yeah, I don’t know that you would know by looking because we like to make the background super different but he had a great experience and it’s a super beautiful historic space.

Q: You guys have a podcast together where you recently talked about your engagement — congrats! What’s a key secret to having a successful healthy relationship with a fellow comedian?

A: Probably the biggest thing is not competing against each other. It is such a competitive business, but that’s one of those things where I feel like there’s not even room for like 0.1% of competing against one another or having any of that, you know, jealousy. You have to genuinely be rooting for the other person all the time and know that whatever they’ve got going on is different than what you’ve got goin’ on. Fortunately for us, I feel like when one of us has a win, it only helps the other person too. It helped that [Chad] started way before I did. We’ve just had totally different paths, and I think by the time we started dating, we both had our own things going on. I think if you come up together and you’re both comics, that is harder to do.

Q: I understand not wanting to compete with your partner in comedy, but you are a very competitive person. Let’s not forget that you are also a world champion foosball player. Can you think of any similarities between foosball and comedy?

A: Oh, there’s so much actually. I mean, it’s generally a solo sport. You can play doubles too in foosball, but if something goes wrong, it’s not like a team sport where you have a bunch of other people to blame. Same with comedy. You are accountable for your own s—. I love both of them so much. It sounds so silly because it’s foosball, but it’s literally the reason I exist. My parents met playing in a professional foosball tournament, so I would not exist if it weren’t for foosball. I still go to the weekly Minneapolis tournaments. I can’t go all the time with the tour schedule, but I still try to go quite a bit, or if I’m back in my hometown of Spokane [Washington], my dad has started to kind of like get back into it again, and so I’ll go with him. It fills me up, it makes me so happy, it’s such a good way to like get out my competitive juices, I guess.

Q: And you probably have some hecklers at these games too, I’m sure.

A: If it’s a bar scene, there’s definitely s— talking going on, but in like an actual tournament, there are refs ... it‘s a whole other world. It’s wild.

Q: What was the most important foosball game you ever won?

A: Oh, that’s a good question. My mom and I won Women’s Expert Doubles together at the Hall of Fame Foosball Tournament in Vegas. And that was like, somebody got like the winning shot on video and I have it and I cherish it because like as you would know from the special, my mom has dementia. And so I am so happy that we got to do that together and that I have that moment on video because we both look just so happy.

Q: Your mom plays a big role in the special, very personal aspect of your life outside of comedy, dealing with dementia and also just being there for a parent, even if she might not know who you are. Why was it important for you to put that out there in this hour?

A: Anytime I would [talk about her dementia in my comedy], the response was so overwhelming of other people who had a parent with dementia or a grandparent saying, “Oh my God, thank you so much for talking about this. Like, I don’t have anybody else in my life going through this, or I don’t hear people talking about it publicly.” And so it kind of just kept encouraging me more and more too. And I also felt like my mom would ultimately want other families to have the knowledge that we now have because it’s a really hard disease to diagnose and we didn’t know what was going on with her for a long time. So I feel like that’s a benefit of me having a platform is like using these experiences and having this info to get it out to other people who might need it. Then getting to talk about her in this special kind of makes me feel like she’s there because she used to come to my shows all the time. So they get a talk about her now, it just feels like I’m including her and it just makes me happy.

Q: You brought up another thing in the special ... cutting your hair, and that feels like a different phase of life too — though maybe a bit less crucial. Did you have to go back and forth on your idea of changing hairstyles before you filmed?

A: I just get a wild hair up my ass every seven years and I just do something drastic to my hair. I don’t know why, but I blame “America’s Next Top Model.” They put that documentary out and I definitely grew up when that was in peak popularity and they would do those makeover episodes where they’d take a girl in and they’d do some crazy haircut or hair color and then they would look fabulous and the best version of themselves. And so I get this delusional thought in my head where I see Rihanna with short hair and I’m like, “That’s what I’m missing. That’s gonna take me there” and it’s like, “Bitch, what are you doing? Like, no part of you looks like Rihanna.” But I feel like I tried to make the best of it. And that’s the nice part about being a comedian, is if you do something that you’re like, maybe this wasn’t as flattering as I thought it would be, you get to make jokes about it. It’s endless material.

Q: Is there anything about it that you would want people to know in terms of what you would hope that audiences walk away from after watching “Happy Hour”?

A: I think probably my favorite compliment that I’ve heard on tour this year, I had a woman come up after the show and she was like, that was so joyful. And it obviously means the world to me when people say, oh my God, I laughed so much, that was funny. But there was something about that word that really clicked for me where I was like “Oh, that is what I’m trying to do.” Even if I’m talking about getting diagnosed with depression or my mom’s dementia, I want it to feel relatable and like bringing light to harder things. That’s why calling it “Happy Hour” I kind of wanted that double meaning in there because trying to have people leave my show feeling better than they came in is like such a great feeling for me. So I hope that they laugh and feel better by the end of it.

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