On Louis C.K.

Misery Tourism‘s theme for November is “abandoned work.” What follows (if I don’t give up now) is not an exercise in automatic writing so much as it is an exercise in agonized writing: the act of writing as self-imposed torture; writing without planning or outline because otherwise I would write nothing. Writing a thing I don’t really want to write, a thing that violates my aesthetic/artistic principles/pretensions, because what the fuck else am I supposed to do, because I want to see my own name on my own site again, because content content content.

And the clock is ticking. (What a cliché.) I went to see Louis C.K. perform in Richmond last Saturday, November 2. 10 pm EDT. (Well, it was at least 10:30 by the time the opening comics performed. Probably 11 by the time Louis emerged.) The second show of the first night of his first official (not being called a comeback, certainly not an apology) tour, since he was accused of (and admitted to) masturbating in front of … You know this already, I’m sure. It’s currently Thursday, November 7th, 3:05 pm EST. (I had to google “edt vs est” to figure out which was which. Point is, we turned the clocks backs Sunday morning.) Over four days have passed. The hot take window has closed. Who can say if this piece will attract any search traffic at all.

But I’ve noticed a dearth of writing about the tour. The New York Times ran an intellectually incoherent review of C.K.’s Richmond set that is valuable mostly as a case study in cognitive dissonance: watch as the columnist tries desperately to square his past admiration for Louis’ work and the fact that he obviously laughed his fucking ass off (watch too as I type those words out in full for probably the first time in my life, in defiance of their acronymal form) with his internalized ideological priors and his desire to continue to write about comedy for The New York Times. The Atlantic uploaded a thinkpiece (ugh) this morning that strains to make a comparison between C.K.’s return to comedy and President Trump’s amoral solipsism and which, aside from some enjoyable play with the similarity between the words “apologetic” and “apoplectic” in its attempt to frame the difference between Louis’ immediate response to his alleged/admitted misdeeds and his current material, is essentially void of any value. Also, in spite of the piece’s timing, the author seems to be writing in response to C.K.’s leaked performance from a few months ago and not his current set, so that diminishes the value of the article now (in this moment already passed) even more.

There’s an opening, is what I’m saying. There’s an opportunity to capitalize on the fact that my longtime favorite comedian’s sexual compulsions have rendered him persona non grata among the very people who were once writing breathlessly—no time to unmix my metaphors. gotta get this up tomorrow. wait that’s not even a mixed metaphor. it’s some other idiotic error in speech. no, not speech: writing. oh well—about his transgressive brilliance. (Be careful, I guess, when, where, how, and with whom you transgress.) There is a vacuum to fill with my inane opinion. There are clicks to be harvested. (No, we do not run ads. But eyes are eyes. And I’m as lonely and needy as any recent Bard graduate writing for Slate. And, like them, someone else’s hard work is subsidizing my silly, egocentric dream.) 

So. Alright. The show. They made us seal away our phones in Yondr pouches. (A sort of miniature teal-highlighted grey body bag with an electronic lock.) This is apparently a common precautionary measure for concerts and live performances of all varieties—I say “apparently” because it was my first experience with it, but as you can probably guess, I do not get out much—but there seemed to be an extra layer of paranoid urgency in its application here.

Louis actually paused his set soon after he started to point out a person in the audience who was openly using his phone. “Look at him. He’s not even trying to hide it. Will someone please take that from him?,” Louis asked in a tone that, honestly, sounded more conciliatory/embarrassed than demanding. “Sorry man. If I let you have that, I’m dead.” (I should mention here that any quotes in this article are reconstructed, probably poorly, from memory, since not only were phones prohibited, but note-taking of any kind was as well.)

While I was waiting for the show to begin—rewind! sorry, sometimes you have to sacrifice strictly chronological progression for the thematic unity of ideas. standup is really just a series of digressions, after all—I listened to a man and woman behind me talking (the man was definitely older than the women, who said something about being a college undergraduate, and it wasn’t clear to me, profound social retard¹ that I am, whether they had just met or had come together) about their anticipation. They both admired Louis’ past work. There was, of course, a discussion of the controversy. What he had done was bad, but, the woman took the lead here: “if you love comedy, you have to be able to tolerate offensive things.” The man brought up Dave Chappelle and Sarah Silverman’s joke that it was appropriate that Chappelle should win the Mark Twain Prize, since both men had such a love of the n-word. The man didn’t say “nigger,” of course (and, surprisingly, apparently neither did Silverman, though I guess even the most fearless comedians hedge a bit when they’re presenting a colleague with a prestigious award). In fact, he seemed uncomfortable to be discussing it at all. He hesitated in the way we all do when we’ve been betrayed by our brain’s unconscious aptitude for associational conversation and bumbled into an area where we cannot predict our audience’s priors or peccadilloes.

I don’t remember how his companion responded. I was thinking about how pre-scripted it all seemed. The discourse had arrived before them. They had memorized talking points. They were regurgitating apologia for an artist who had already apologized for himself in a room full of people who had paid fifty bucks a head to see him perform. (There were no hecklers in the audience, by the way. No protestors outside.) They were offering justifications in anticipation of objections that no one present was interested in making (except maybe that dude from The New York Times, seated anonymously among us, probably mentally preparing to calibrate his laughter to meet social expectations, just in case he was recognized).

But fuck that. Let’s talk about the show. (Over 1,000 words and no actual discussion of C.K.’s routine yet. A masterclass in procrastination.) I’m going to avoid spoiling the jokes to the best of my ability, in part because I hope one day Louis releases a standup special (maybe just on his website, like his mock-televised pseudo-stage-play Horace and Pete, if HBO and Netflix are not interested) and you can appreciate them for yourself, untainted by my awkward (as I am in all things) retelling, but also because the purchase of my tickets apparently came with a fine print stipulation that I not reproduce any of his jokes verbatim under threat of legal action. (Yikes.)

So, without spoiling any punchlines, here’s a rough summary of C.K.’s performance: A big chunk of the set (maybe a 1/4 or so) was about his mother’s death and his own mortality. And the rest of it seemed to be trying out every possible permutation of offensive joke imaginable. He joked about 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, Africans who believe having sex with babies is a cure for AIDS, the use of the word “retard,” bestiality, pedophilia (separate from the African bit), the whole masturbating in front of women thing, Mormons, the Holocaust, suicide bombers getting 72 virgins in heaven, gay men enjoying sex less now that it’s socially acceptable, blackface, and did an extended bit that involved speaking in an exaggerated Asian accent. (Notably absent from the routine was the bit about Parkland’s school-shooting-survivors-turned-activists that was the subject of a brief but intense media freakout when an unsanctioned recording of one of Louis’ sets leaked a few months ago. Given the material that did make the cut, I don’t think the Parkland material was excised out of concern for good taste, but rather because, well, it wasn’t particularly funny.² )

(Mea culpa: Aside from the parenthetical, most of the previous paragraph is an act of self plagiarism. I stole it from a forum post I made the day after I attended the show. I can feel the differences in diction, caused by a difference in anticipated audiences, between it and the rest of this article. It’s painful. But deadlines, even self-imposed, demand concessions. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.)

Ah ha, you’re saying, I’ve got you figured out. That’s what this is. It’s about the death of an idol. All of these rationalizations. You just don’t want to bury a man who you admire. You don’t want to admit that his career is dead. That it was an execution. That he deserved it. It would probably be easier for you if he was dead, because then you could say, “No living person benefits when I consume this art I love. Who cares about the sins of a dead man. The dead get no royalties.” But you can’t say that now, and—

Nah. I’m happy to see him performing again. I’m happy that he’s getting paid. They gave him a standing ovation when the show ended. I was the third (I think) person to stand. The first in my row. Someone yelled, “We love you Louie!” (That wasn’t me. I don’t have that kind of courage.) He has given me a lot of joy. Perverse joy, yes. But joy joy joy.

I am afraid of death though. Terrified. (Just remembered that it was a brain tumor that killed Gene Siskel. Ugh.)]

OK, let me spoil one punchline: There was an extended bit relatively early in the set about a wheelchair Louis saw in the display window of a drug store. He wonders aloud about who the target audience of this advertising strategy could be (“Is a wheelchair really an impulse buy?”) and imagines a man, his legs paralyzed for years, dragging himself slowly and agonizingly down the street with his hands, only to see the wheelchair in the window and experience a moment of clarity as he realizes that there’s a better way to live. The audience is laughing along. And then the kicker (ha): Louis reveals that the (imaginary) man lost the ability to walk in the Boston Marathon bombing. (His delivery is funnier than mine.) “Oh yeah,” Louis heckles the crowd, “you were ready to laugh at a cripple … but not this particular cripple.” (Once again, couldn’t take notes, paraphrasing.)

(Quick aside here: I didn’t actually hear any boos or “oh no”s or any variety of gasp from the crowd after the twist. Maybe a groan or two. It’s certainly possible that Louis was in a better position to read the crowd’s response than I was. It’s also possible, likely even, that the crowd being aghast at the joke’s turn was baked into the bit, and he was responding to the crowd he needed, not the one he had. One of the {few} downsides of playing to a crowd composed exclusively of your most devoted, scandal-resistant fans {and one New York Times columnist}.)

I didn’t spoil this joke just to show you how poor my sense of comic timing is. I think it serves as the closest thing to a, ew, “thesis statement” that you’re likely to find for this post-cancellation stage of his career. Louis is probing the opaque, inconsistent nature of offensiveness itself. Taking for granted that the target of most humor is human suffering, why are we comfortable laughing at some tragedies and travesties, but not others? 

But speaking of theses, wait, let me back up. I forgot that old rule of phoned-in undergraduate papers: You open by explaining the problem. Or, really, you open by explaining your audience’s expectations (read: setting them) about how the problem will be solved (or at least explained) and then telling them, directly, that their expectations (which are actually yours, of course) are full of shit.

Here, so you don’t have to conjure them yourselves, are your assumptions: 1. Louis C.K. will do the good, conscientious thing and emerge from two years of quiet contemplation with a carefully considered set of self-aware and self-deprecating jokes rooted in his own humility and the ethical framework laid out by today’s great moral philosophers in Vox, Vulture, Vice, and other comparable publications not beginning with “V.” OR: 2. He will become Milo Yiannopoulos.

We know now that option #1 ain’t happening. So it must be #2, right? (Can you hear that flushing sound?) But it’s not that at all. There was no clear political valence to his set at all. There was one (contrary to the opinion of the New York Times columnist, quite funny) joke about cultural appropriation, but even that joke was just serving an age old purpose of comedy: exposing and disarming our hypocrisy, insisting that we see reality through a lens other than that which we wear to work every day (well, for those of you still working) or which we use to interpret our carefully curated social interactions (for those of you who still leave your apartments).

AH. STOP. This is what I want to say: The paradigm is shifting. Louis’ return. Sticks & Stones. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Jesus is King. The cascading death toll of publications dedicated to producing hot takes in much the same manner as factory-farmed eggs. This isn’t some conservative backlash to woke leftism. None of these artists are conservative. You can’t understand the significance of any of this with our current, tired discursive framework. The phantasmagoric culture war that has dominated nearly all advertising-subsidized writing on popular culture for … I don’t know … a decade, maybe? … is over. If you’re reading this you are free. It was all in your imagination. It was a dream. Recalibrate your conscience to new norms. Move the fuck on. Peace be with you. (Or some new sociomoral anxiety, if that’s your preference.) 

1. I hesitated before using this word, not because it’s offensive, but because Louis did a lengthy bit on it during his show, and I knew I could not use it without acknowledging that fact, which would mean adding this footnote, which will almost certainly prove to be a formatting nightmare when I paste this piece into the WordPress editor in preparation for its publication.
2. Alright, since I’ve already committed to editing these fucking footnotes, let me talk a little more about this. It’s been a while since I listened to the bootleg performance in question—and I’m certainly not going to interrupt my current flow to engage in an act with as poor a return on investment as fact-checking—but I remember being disappointed in the Parkland bit. This wasn’t because I found it offensive (haha) or because I felt, as some were quick to speculate, that Louis was trying to rebrand as a “conservative comic.” (How weird, by the way, to be alive in an era where joking that kids should be out having sex and doing drugs instead engaging in their constitutional right to peacefully petition the government regarding an issue of broad national concern is considered conservative.) Instead, it seemed a lazy continuation of the “kids today …” bits that Louis often seemed to default to as mid-set time fillers during his pre-#MeToo career. Maybe he could have turned it into a sort of dark reflection (or even satire) of these bits with a little tuning, but, as presented in the recording, it really wasn’t that either. It just felt like topicality serving as bondo to hold together a rusted and embarrassing old bit.
3. Oh. I didn’t elaborate on the bit that you are probably most curious about. Yes, about two-thirds of the way through the set, he did address that particular scandal directly, and briefly. His takeaway is essentially: sometimes if you ask someone if they want to watch you jack off, and they say yes, you should treat it as a no. Probably not the penetrating insight you were hoping for, but sound life advice nonetheless. And more evidence of Louis’ commitment to using comedy as a means to think honestly aloud, refusing to add false profundity (or false contrition) to topics that seem banal to him, and refusing to pretend to see in places where he is blind.