No joke: Louis C.K. exposed

No way to laugh this off, Louis

TWO months ago, Louis C.K. told The New York Times his forthcoming film, “I Love You, Daddy,” was “just kind of a sweet movie about the twilight of childhood and parenthood.”

Now, amid claims of C.K.’s gross sexual misconduct, that movie — which screened at the Toronto Film Festival, won raves from male critics and sold for $5 million to distributor The Orchard — will probably be seen by very few people.

Despite the film’s queasy premise — C.K. plays a rich, famous television writer who has a sexualized relationship with his 17-old-daughter, who in turn becomes involved with a 68-year-old filmmaker inspired by Roman Polanski — C.K. was able to hide behind his intellectual and liberal bona fides.

He enjoyed a reputation as a feminist. “My daughter is a feminist, and I identify with her, with her rights and her feelings, and I’m listening to her,” he told New York magazine last year. He endorsed Hillary over Bernie and Trump. Of the nearly allmale late-night landscape, he said Samantha Bee was the best: “She’s like, yes, I am a f- -king feminist!’ ” he said. “She’s right about everything that I see her talk about.”

This all allowed C.K., until Thursday, to smugly elide years-long accusations that he forced unwilling women to watch him masturbate. He treated the need to deny these stories, let alone address them, as beneath an artist of his caliber.

“Well, you can’t touch stuff like that,” he told New York last year. “There’s one more thing I want to say about this, and it’s important: If you need your public profile to be all positive, you’re sick in the head. I do the work I do, and what happens next I can’t look after. So my thing is that I try to speak to the work whenever I can. Just to the work and not to my life.”

This has always been the defense: The onus is on us, mere consumers of such great work, to separate the art from the artist — who, after all, is operating on a far higher philosophical plane. Morality, for them, is an abstraction. Creativity must be unfettered to flourish.

In a post-Weinstein world, such justifications no longer stand.

I saw an advance screening of “I Love You, Daddy” on Monday with a male colleague. He loved it; I found it misogynistic and disturbing. C.K. cowrote, directed and stars in the film, which co-stars 20-year-old Chloe Grace Moretz as his sex-bomb daughter. Moretz’s character enjoys speaking to her father, at length, in nothing more than a bikini and an open chiffon robe and is portrayed as a bimbo who needs two older men — her father and the lecherous pedophile — to explain feminism to her.

The C.K. character is surrounded by two-dimensional women who worship him because, despite his boorishness, he’s a genius. (Of course.) His closest friend is a knuckle-dragger who mimes masturbating whenever an attractive woman is speaking — depicted here as a charming eccentricity. (Of course.)

C.K.’s character does nothing as his daughter becomes increasingly involved with the pedophile he professionally worships. C.K. also wrote a speech in which a female character defends this “relationship” that, in any context, is clearly a predator grooming his prey. C.K. then has an exchange with his daughter’s best friend, a 17-year-old girl who defends this sexual predation: “Everybody’s a pervert,” she says.

In response, the C.K. character makes a move on this child.

Oh, and the N-word is used, as is “retarded,” more than once. It’s hard to create a landscape where using our worst racial and social epithets get criticized in passing, but Louis C.K. has surpassed himself.

There’s a truism in the comedy world that comedians should be allowed to say anything at all, no matter how offensive, because that is their art: They are truth tellers. They need to push against societal norms, or outright reject them, to help us reach larger, more important realizations. They alone should be off limits to value judgments.

Increasingly, this sounds ridiculous. It’s like the pope being infallible because the pope says so. It’s a self-serving tautology.

In fact, if you look at C.K.’s work, misogyny and predation have always been there. On an episode of his critically acclaimed FX show, “Louie,” his character tried to force himself, repeatedly, on an unwilling woman, blocking her from leaving a room.

In 2012, he drunk-tweeted Sarah Palin, writing, “I want to rub my father’s c--k all over Sarah Palin’s fat t-ts,” and “kudos to your dirty hole, you f- -king jack-off c- -t-face jazzy wondergirl.” (He later apologized.)

That same year, he defended another comic who confronted a female heckler by threatening gang rape. C.K. has joked that society should lighten up on child molesters so they won’t feel pressure to murder the kids they’ve just raped. He’s joked about rape himself — “You think I’m just going to rape you on the off chance you’re into that s- -t?” he said in his 2008 “Chewed Up” tour — and told Jon Stewart in 2012 that despite learning from women that sexual assault isn’t funny, “I can still enjoy a good rape joke.”

In defense of “I Love You, Daddy” — which also contains jokes about child rape — C.K. told The Hollywood Reporter, “It’s just a f- -king movie.”

Not anymore.