Louis C.K. is the Best Stand-Up Comedian in the Country. Why Isn’t He More Interested in Making Us Laugh?
On his most recent comedy tour, Louis C.K. did a bit about the problem of boring chitchat. Imagine what it would be like, he said, if instead of turning to the guy next to you in the elevator and commenting on the weather, you instead told him, “I haven’t spoken to my father in ten years.”
It’s a good joke, but, like most good jokes, it’s also more than a joke. In fact, the more you watch “Louie,” C.K.’s half-hour show on FX, the more you sense that C.K’s real goal isn’t to be funny. There are comic moments — usually hilarious ones — but C.K.’s larger project, it increasingly seems, is to turn his audience into that unsuspecting guy in the elevator, to set us up for something lighthearted and then leave us squirming in the face of an unexpectedly raw moment.
This move away from comedy progresses throughout the first season of “Louie” so that some of the final episodes have hardly any jokes at all. In one particularly humorless episode, Louie (the character, as opposed to C.K., the actor) is on a date when a group of rowdy teenagers begin to harass him. Louie’s humiliation at the hands of the teens is so palpable — he’s forced to beg the main tormentor not to kick his ass — that it’s hard to watch. But C.K. isn’t done with us. When the teens finally leave Louie alone, there’s an agonizing scene in which Louie’s date confesses that she’s no longer attracted to him. Next one of the teens is manhandled by his abusive father. It isn’t dark humor because there is nothing funny about the dark moments. Nor is it tragedy. It’s more pedantic than that. It’s anti-comedy, the art of making us uncomfortable.
It really is hard to overstate the strangeness of what C.K. — who writes, directs and edits the show – is doing in these more serious episodes. If you haven’t watched “Louie,” imagine that, mid-season, Seinfeld aired an almost humorless episode in which Jerry’s girlfriend is raped. Imagine a joke-free Simpsons’s episode in which Homer and Marge get into a car accident.
And yet it’s hard to complain. Because when the more serious side of Louie is working, such as when a gay friend chastises Louie and his buddies for their homophobic jokes over a poker game, the realism is unlike anything else on television. It’s not the comic vérité of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or “The Office,” where the absurdity, however enjoyable, breaks the illusion that you’re watching real people. “Louie” is sometimes sublimely bizarre — the episode in which he’s orally raped by his dentist while having a Bin Laden hallucination comes to mind. But when “Louie” turns serious there’s no stylized camerawork or witty banter to remind you that what you’re watching is make believe. The show is entirely fictional and yet at moments it’s as close to “reality TV” as we’ve ever come.
Perhaps the strangest part of the show’s move away from comedy is that C.K. is the best stand-up comedian in the country right now Watching his last two comedy tours is like witnessing a great athlete in his prime. We know that C.K. works tirelessly to perfect the material and yet it looks effortless. It’s not just the standard fare sex jokes. C.K.’s best bits are often about raising his daughters. The jokes might be dark, but he never stops making us laugh. And this is why, great as it is, “Louie” is also sometimes maddening. If C.K. only wanted us to laugh more often, “Louie” would be the funniest show on TV, perhaps one of the funniest shows ever.
So why is the best comedian in America turning away, at least partially, from comedy? It’s hard to know for sure, but a recent episode of “Louie” offers a clue. After quitting his stand-up gig in casino lounge, Louie ends up in Joan Rivers’s hotel room (she’s performing at the same hotel). Rivers asks him why he quit his gig, and Louie, mystified by his own behavior, says that he got tired of the “bullshit.”
This may be the best way to understand “Louie”: it’s pushback against the bullshit, the bullshit of life in general, and the bullshit of TV in particular. Before “Louie,” C.K. had done an HBO show called “Lucky Louie” that failed at translating his hilarious stand-up bits into comedic dialogue. C.K. only agreed to do a show with FX in exchange for full creative control. Whatever bullshit went down with “Lucky Louie,” C.K. didn’t want it to happen again.
The Joan Rivers episode ends with Rivers yelling at Louie for quitting — and if you’ve seen Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, the documentary about Rivers, you know she’s not joking about her commitment to comedy. “We make people happy,” Rivers tells Louie. “It’s a calling.” Louie takes the message to heart and as the credits roll we see him trying to get his stand-up gig back.
We can only hope that C.K. follows Rivers’s advice in real life as well and keeps the show darkly comic, as opposed to anti-comic. Because as much as I admire the realism and experimentalism of the more serious “Louie” episodes, we don’t need C.K. to move beyond comedy any more than we needed Woody Allen to turn himself into Ingmar Bergman, as he seemed to want to do after the success of his early slapsticks. It’s understandable that C.K. is sick of the bullshit and that he wants to grow as an artist, but plenty of less funny people can push the boundaries of realism. No one can make us laugh as hard as Louis C.K.
Sam Apple
Sam Apple is the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Faster Times. He has served as the editor-in-chief of New Voices Magazine and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Financial Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, and Slate.com, among ...
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