Lou must be joking J
The comic should return to the stage — but there’s only one way to do it right
ESUS, Louis. Could you botch your comeback any worse?
Trying out some new material on the sly, eh? Sneaking into the Comedy Cellar for a surprise set here and there (earlier this week, and before that in late August) with no acknowledgment of why you’ve been off the radar?
You need to hear the cold, hard truth from a longtime fan: I can’t believe how hard you’re failing.
I mean, I can believe a lot of things. I believe you’re guilty of sexual misconduct. I definitely believe you used your power and privilege to do the things you’ve been accused of doing: masturbating in front of women, multiple women, without their consent. Anyone who’s been listening to your comedy or watching your show has seen that gross side of you hiding in plain sight for years. You literally have a bit on one album about a guy who, when he makes the universal hand sign for masturbation, is compelled to do it to completion. That filthy bit would still be funny, if only you hadn’t actually done it in front of unwilling participants. And I knew the rumors. Long before they were confirmed, a lot of us knew about them. We didn’t want to believe them, but we knew they were probably true, because they matched up so well with your act.
Here’s the sad part: I’m partly furious with you because I really miss your comedy. You were my favorite. Your blisteringly dark stand-up, when you were really hitting your prime, was the best of the best. I find myself going back to lines of yours all the time. The one about our collective inability to appreciate the wonders of modern life, I roll that out every time I’m on a plane and someone near me shuts the window shade in broad daylight, lest a ray of sunshine fall across the movie they’re watching on their laptop. (“We’re FLYING!” I want to shout, in homage.)
But all the lesser stuff, too. You nailed it. The indignity of aging, the annoyingness of entitled white people. The impotent, homoerotic rage of a pack of bros trying to get lucky on a Saturday night. All your really inappropriate material about how genuinely crappy and tedious parenting can be, but in an existentially hilarious way. Fueled by selfhatred and an uncanny ability to look mortality in the eye, you were a truth teller who told it the way I needed to hear it. You took an interesting left turn in your special for Netflix last year, “Louis C.K. 2017,” in your bit about how you wouldn’t let yourself finish the movie “Magic Mike,” and your fascination with Matthew McConaughey: “I’m pretty sure,” you said, “that the end of ‘Magic Mike’ is that I’m gay.” (I traveled to a damn casino in Connecticut to see you perform that special live, lest you doubt my bona fides as a fan.)
I’m even one of the few who saw your disastrous film “I Love You, Daddy,” at last year’s Toronto Film Festival before it was yanked from distribution for very wise and obvious reasons: It was a thinly veiled (and not particularly enjoyable) mea culpa about being a pervy middle-aged white dude. It also included a vignette of comic Charlie Day acting out the masturbation gag, so it was pretty clear that was a recurring obsession for you.
But it was a departure from your norm, which was excellence. The unexpected drama of “Horace and Pete.” The auteurish self-laceration of “Louie.” Even your e-mail-subscriber letters were worthwhile: witty, chatty, badly spelled. They read like you were writing as a person and not a celebrity: “I probably shouldn’t send this email. But I will. I think it’s okay that you see this side of me. Like when I’m with my kids and I catch myself, realizing I’ve been a cranky a--hole with them for the last couple of hours. I catch it and inside of myself I think ‘You’re being a d--k. Cool off’ but then I think ‘Well, keep it like this for another ten minutes’ and I stay cranky a little longer, even though I have the control now to scale it back. I realize that that example might make me sound like a sociopath. Well, okay. Think what you want.”
Well, OK. The truth is out and people, an awful lot of them, think you’re a terrible person. Me, yeah, I’m filled with rage on those women’s behalf. How dare you put them in that position and then deny it and then, when you did come out with a half-assed admission of guilt, refuse to simply, abjectly apologize to them.
But also, how dare you fumble a comeback this badly? You’re smarter than this, dude. You made your name making us laugh about the most awful things about humanity, and you can’t manage to be candid about this one awful thing about yourself? First of all, that’s just bad business savvy. Be the first! Go boldly where no sexual predator has gone before: Make good comedy out of explaining yourself and apologizing to those women. REALLY apologizing. If anyone can do it, it’s you.
I can tell you this, though, it ain’t gonna be with hacky new material involving a) making fun of rape whistles and b) your 9-year-old daughter trying on risque shirts at Old Navy, respectively, from your first and second surprise appearances at the Comedy Cellar over the past few weeks.
The way to make a stand-up special these days is to make it into something else entirely. Just ask Australian comic Hannah Gadsby, whose Netflix special “Nanette” is a worldwide sensation. Or Tig Notaro, whose 2012 planned stand-up set launched into a description of being diagnosed with breast cancer and ended up a comedy gamechanger — distributed BY YOU. (Of course, Notaro eventually distanced herself from you as a producer of her show “One Mississippi,” and for good reason.)
There’s no better time for your brand of humor — no, let’s say whatever new brand of humor you come up with — than now. Few male comics have really managed to simultaneously puncture and embody the specter of vile, red-faced, self-hating, woman-hating, bloviating men than you. This is you in 2013: “How do women still go out with guys, when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number-one threat! To women! Globally and historically, we’re the number-one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We’re the worst thing that ever happens to them!”
I know that part of your brain gets the irony in that. I have faith that you are self-aware enough to use that knowledge. Don’t prove me wrong. Let your guard down. Admit you used your male privilege for bad — really bad — and why, in painful detail, it sucks to have done what you did. Admit that it’s what’s still happening to women all over the country, all over the world. Admit it TO THOSE WOMEN YOU HURT IN PARTICULAR, in public.
In short, Louis, make the comeback, and make it count. I can accept you as a perv — there are plenty of ways to indulge that fetish that don’t involve preying on unwilling women. But I can’t accept you as a coward.