Is Louis Ck Going to Perform Again
What Louis C.K. Has Really Lost
Louis C.Thousand. has a new self-released stand-up special, somewhat trollishly titled Deplorable. It's the 2nd since the 2017 reports of his masturbating in forepart of unwilling women scuttled the launch of his movie I Love You, Daddy, crushed legions of his fans (including this one), and evoked a promise from the comedian to "stride back and listen."
And then information technology's unsurprising that new Louis C.K. material would spark some other wearied bike of … I was going to say debate, but it'southward inappreciably fifty-fifty that anymore. Whether cancel culture exists and how it has afflicted C.Thou. specifically has all been too thoroughly chewed over, and I decline to masticate on it. We're in the domain of dunks now, with bitter jokes (again, since the same joke circulated with his 2019 special, Sincerely Louis C.K.*) that it's on brand for the comic to release something without consent, while defenders like Ben Shapiro mock those who care about the allegations: "Louis CK is hilarious. Thus he volition continue to survive and thrive. Your whining will change none of this." (Some pointed out that his tweet actually concedes that "cancel culture" isn't a real threat.) In short, this all feels like shadow boxing, and these reprises of an former controversy aren't getting the states anywhere new or interesting.
Simply then there'southward the comedy itself. It turns out that C.K.'south stand-upwards is stuck in a weird mode that reflects some of the exhausted discourse around him. Until Sorry, I hadn't watched whatsoever new Louis C.K. material since "canceling" him in my ain life iv years ago. I finally watched his recent work at my editor's insistence. And here'south my verdict: The special isn't bad; it's maybe a B minus/C plus if you're grading the comic confronting himself. It'due south also not aiming for much more than that. It's non aggressive. Louis C.K. doesn't grapple with the allegations with anything like the candor and sincerity he's capable of at his best (I'm thinking of some of the greatest episodes of Louie, among other things). But the comedic aspirations are lower too: While Louis C.K. remains the undefeated champion of deftly circumnavigating taboos, something has been lost besides his reputation.
For one, he's repeating a lot of themes you'll recognize from other specials. Louis C.Chiliad. has long prided himself on putting out a whole new hour of cloth every year or ii, but even when the jokes are new, the moves are familiar. They include things like picking a taboo word like a gay slur or the N-word to recuperate and redefine according to his own peculiar lights, where the game is to say it as many times as possible. Then there's the sexual taboo stuff: Sometimes it'southward necrophilia, sometimes it's pedophilia, merely the point is usually to offer a creatively shocking solution to the problem of sexual compulsives, like offering his dead body for sexual practice or proposing the cosmos of realistic dolls so pedophiles will spare children. In both cases the point is to mock the audience for piously hypocritical attitudes that prioritize respectability over dirty pragmatism. In that location'due south usually some observational sense of humor about religion—in his final pre-scandal special, 2017, he was talking virtually how Christianity has "won" ("The Christians won everything a long fourth dimension ago. If y'all don't believe me, let me ask you a question: What year is it? I mean, come up on!"), and in Sincerely Louis C.1000. he reflected on how completely it has lost ("That shit is over. Y'all go to a church and it'south like going to a roller-skating rink on a Wed"). At that place are always a few $.25 done in his "Valley girl" phonation in which he parodies some urban neurosis or elite double standard. There are also a few bits done in offensive indigenous accents (typically Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Jewish) that he generates elaborate rationales for using—and this besides is the game, to go on yous on board while he creeps closer and closer to the indefensible, enjoying the audience's squirming discomfort. ("It'due south gonna be OK," he says midway through a riff near observing a Black woman selecting bananas in the grocery store. It doesn't quite pay off.) There's commonly an extended section in which he flirts with a homosexual attraction and whether or non information technology would make him less manly and how he would arroyo a penis. And there is ever, always, masturbation and sexual practice: how bad he looks having information technology and doing it in which positions, and and then on, and so on.
There's virtuosic skill involved in all this boundary-skirting, but C.K. is and so skillful at it, and nosotros've seen him do information technology and so often, that information technology'southward not the revolutionary stuff it once was (it'southward non that fun to watch a tightrope walker practice the aforementioned thing 18 times). Compared with his best work, it'due south a pretty simple routine. No big flips. But I realized equally I was watching that there was a different sort of gamble C.One thousand. was taking in Deplorable: Sure, he'south doing riffs on a lot of the same quondam themes, but he's doing them this fourth dimension without a prophylactic net.
Let me explicate.
The way C.M.'s flirtations with the offensive and the taboo work, at least historically, is by making himself a temporary stand-in for the bad guy. He ventriloquizes everything a pedophile might exist thinking in infrequent detail, for example. Or take the bit in Sorry near a Blackness woman picking out bananas. The joke starts off with how creepy he feels being a white man watching a Black woman pick bananas, and then gets mad that he feels creepy because he isn't creepy—he just wants bananas and it's not his fault that a racist clan exists—and finally ends with him giving up and going to the strawberries, where there's "a Jew." It'southward sort of a typical triple lutz of a Louis C.K. joke, right? The twist existence that the persona he's been playing equally non just aware about stereotypes but righteously offended at being wrongly suspected of being a racist pitter-patter turns out to be kind of a race-obsessed weirdo in this whole other "Jew-in-the-strawberries" way. It's sort of a dauntless joke (tactically) in that, like many C.1000. bits, it annihilates the C.K. character's ethical "goodness." The person whose perspective you thought you were in sympathy with is kind of horrible. I thought this particular instance was a little weak, but it's thekind of joke Louis C.Thou. is really, really good at.
It's also obviously a riskier kind of sense of humour for him to endeavour post-scandal. The success of such a joke depends heavily on the audience trusting that the comic beneath the "creep" personaisn't horrible. That by so precisely articulating such a perspective, it's implicitly a critique. That meta layer is the safety cyberspace I'grand talking about: For most of C.Thou.'s career, the "real" Louis C.One thousand.—a genuinely practiced guy troubled by demons but with a compassionate and decent core—has functioned as an authorizing alibi of sorts for the special'south boundary-violating experiments. "Louis is a creep" is a leitmotif in C.K.'s comedy, a rich vein he's mined in special after special, but the subtext has always been that he really isn't: The Existent Louis C.K. was the hapless, kind of muddy, simply conscientious guy who bought a Girls Gone Wild DVD after his divorce but couldn't jack off to it because he kept—as a dad—getting mad at the girls for making stupid choices.
The revelations have made it harder to believe in that version of him; to a lot of his old fans, one horrifying thing nigh the allegations was that he turned out to exist the very creep we idea he was lampooning. The joke we thought we were laughing at wasn't a joke at all. The fashion he'southward deployed that hapless-but-harmless version of himself in response to the scandal isn't helping. In Sincerely Louis C.K., the comic'southward manner of tackling the allegations was to speak briefly as what I guess I'm calling the Existent Louis C.Yard., by which I mean some comically heightened approximation of the real guy and not the theatrical deviant that C.M.'s jokes often require him to be. "If you ever ask somebody, 'May I wiggle off in front of you?' and they say yes, just say, 'Are you sure?' That'south the offset function," C.Grand. says in Sincerely. "And then if they say yes, just don't fuckin' do it. Only don't do it." Having all but asserted that all his accusers consented, he suggests that what he'd failed to understand is that women feign sexual pleasance or "being OK" the manner slaves sang spirituals, and it falls to men to somehow distinguish between these performances and expressions of genuine well-being.
The comparison to slavery is typical C.1000. outrage-bait and useful inasmuch every bit the shock of it partly buries the absurdity of what he's really saying there: As if any of the women whom he masturbated in front end of or on the phone with—sometimes, again, without their consent—were moaning with faked pleasure!
I tin can admire the rhetorical dexterity of this (and its complication as a strategic maneuver!) while recognizing it as a real waste of the comedic machinery that then lets us safely express mirth at … the pedophilia content. It tarnishes the cocky-deprecating and uncompromising Real Louis C.Thousand. persona by putting him to the ignoble service of downplaying and distorting the allegations to make himself wait better—instead of telling difficult truths. It as well wastes an opportunity for that guy—and I'd argue that that guy has always been Louis C.One thousand.'due south real superweapon—to really tackle a genuine trouble a lot of men struggle with. Louis C.M. is our foremost lyricist on sexual compulsions! He has, in the past, been willing to confront hard problems and his own mistakes with revelatory candor! He could have gotten real well-nigh any psychosexual hang-ups led him to sexually harass industry colleagues (and I'd love to hear him of all people talk nigh that, because information technology'due south obviously a serious problem that we could all stand to meliorate comprehend). But instead of reckoning with power or shame, he compares his kink to wanting to prove off that one is good at juggling. He's good at masturbating, he says in Sincerely Louis C.K. You want to show off what you're good at.
That whole section in 2019's Sincerely has been correctly characterized as a non-apology or worse. I'd argue, on a more mundane but critical front, that information technology's bad for his comedy likewise. By using the Real Louis C.Grand. to awkwardly (and counterfactually) defend himself, he'south fudging the baseline nosotros really need to trust in society for his riskier I'm-a-creep jokes to popular. The meat of C.K.'s earlier specials wasn't the sex stuff or the recuperation of taboo words or the pedo- and necrophilia; it was the grouchy but compassionate social philosophizing underneath. The strangely sincere discussions of divorce or the weirdness of fatherhood or homosocial want or of his ain flaws and his efforts to overcome them.
That stuff basically comes from the Existent Louis C.Grand. (working in tandem with the grinning, acrobatic taboo-buster, who usually made the stuff funny), and there merely isn't much of that guy left in Sorry. Hell, information technology seems like there wasn't much left in earlier iterations of Sincerely Louis C.K., based on leaked sound in which C.K. mocked the Parkland survivors, lamented losing $35 meg, objected to using transgender people's chosen pronouns, and ranked the penis sizes of various races. C.Thousand. didn't seem transcendent or subversive then much every bit kind of hacky and reactionary. And while he's modulated much of that bulletin in Sorry—he praises young people for having a wider spectrum than male and female and speculates about what that might have meant for him—the final message of the special is a tad retrograde too. If most of Louis C.Yard.'s oeuvre has been about mocking masculine desire every bit base and embarrassing and gross, Sorry concludes by calling contemporary gay men "real men" considering they're athletic, and calls gimmicky straight men the slur once reserved for gay men considering they're at present sensitive and intelligent and therefore unlikely to arouse women.
Over the past several years I've idea a lot about 2017, Louis C.Chiliad.'s last pre-scandal special. I still uncomplicatedly admired him when I watched it, and I call back being surprised at his choice to wear a conform for the starting time time. It fabricated a certain kind of sense. Upwardly until then, C.G. had reliably been the schlub in a blackness T-shirt, the sort of confident and wry and evidently bright blue-neckband genius who could somehow convince yous he was besides a hangdog pathetic loser. But as he got more than and more than successful, information technology got harder for him to play up the "loser" role. By the time of 2017, Louis was hailed by pretty much everybody as the ultimate winner—virtually to be a celebrated film auteur in add-on to being the nigh admired stand-up in the world and the creator of a revolutionary TV series he edited himself. His wealth and fame were starting to clash with the comedic persona he used in his human action. 2017 in some ways represented his effort to accost his class shift: He included some throwaway lines, like how his family unit listens to NPR "considering we're amend than yous." It's a good special—better than I call up, honestly—but I remember feeling that by no longer being an underdog, he'd lost something he needed to really make his act piece of work. Well, he has again what he was missing then. Beggary is Louis C.K.'s medium; information technology suits him, and he thrives in it. Only what he's missing now is much harder to recover.
Correction, Dec. 24, 2021: This commodity originally misstated the title of Louis C.K.'s special Sincerely Louis C.G.
Source: https://slate.com/culture/2021/12/louis-ck-new-special-sorry-what-is-missing.html
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