How do I put a comments popup link on single.php?

So I’ve enabled popup comments, and have edited the comments-popup.php page and all that. They work great from the main page. But what I’d like to do when you’re viewing a single post (using single.php as a template) is to have a similar link to a popup window for the comments, instead of displaying them at the bottom of the post like they do by default. However, the following:

<?php comments_popup_link(__('Comments (0)'), __('Comments (1)'), __('Comments (%)')); ?>

does absolutely nothing. It doesn’t display any kind of link utilizing that code and I can’t figure out why. This line

<?php comments_template(); // Get wp-comments.php template ?>

lists the comments, but I’d rather have them on a separate, dynamic page and not have them load with each post.

Does that make sense?