One of the very few mutually beloved comedians
left, Louis C.K., fell to the MeToo movement
for his admitted habit of masturbating in
front of women.
Nobody with a basic sense of decency is going
to try to convince you that that isn’t simultaneously
pathetic, weak, and potentially exploitative.
But that doesn’t make make his bag of dicks
joke or any other unfunny because of his lack
of virtue.
It doesn’t, for example, make his latest
set at the Governor’s club less than hysterical,
which it was.
It was in keeping with the style of all his
other sets: lewdly stated absurdities and
comical self-loathing.
CK opens (0:27) by asking the audience, “Have
you ever had a whole bad year?
A whole year that sucks 365 shit cunt days
in a row?
I mean, fuck.”
Maybe he deserved that kind of year.
But the outrage that he was met with for this
set at an obscure comedy club, which he wasn’t
even aware was being recorded had very little
to do with his past sins, and more to do with
the targets of his jokes.
And his targets looked a lot more like David
Hogg and Emma Gonzalez than Ted Cruz and Donald
Trump.
A world where he mocks Republicans only to
be reluctantly offered back into the elites’
good graces isn’t hard to imagine by any
means.
That’s what stood out as his cardinal sin:
if he had came out swinging at the right,
no doubt the New York Times would at least
consider his atonement.
Instead, scorn is heaped upon his fluorescent
head because of his most controversial joke
yet: that the Parkland kids have no expertise
on gun policy.
An obvious statement made in a comical fashion.
We’re told that this was an act of “punching
down”, as though a fat, exiled, masturbating
public menace could “punch down” a group
of kids who’ve been esteemed as policy experts
and given air time to preach their case on
every major media outlet from CNN to MSNBC.
Because his set is funny, his most vicious
critics would rather pretend that it was “hacky,
unfunny, shallow” as criticized by Judd
Apatow.
Being the same guy who went on a tweetstorm
telling Trump to “Shut the fuck up”, you’d
expect he’d know a thing or two about being
hacky.
More damning is the clear moral hypocrisy
of the people who are at the center of Hollywood’s
power circles, just like Judd Apatow.
On the podcast, the Church of What’s Happening
Now, comedians Joey Diaz and Sam Tripoli discuss
just how piranha-like people like Apatow are.
Joey asks the question of what point he can
come back and claims that, “the same people
who put him up are the same people who took
him down.”
Tripoli continues on that track, adding that
you can’t get offended retroactively because
what was known internally has now come
to light.
Leftist critics aren’t used to being the
butts of jokes, so instead of simply admitting
that they were offended by a joke, the best
they can do is remind us of just how unfunny
the joke in question is, hoping that if they
say it loud enough it’ll drown out our laughter.
Because of his damaged public image, of course
these same people who let him make the kind
of offensive humor he once did are going to
come out of the woodwork to take him down
as many notches possible.
It’s easy in the wake of the onslaught of
MeToo scandals to be swept up by the bottomless
depth of wrongdoing and lump his inappropriate
conduct in with the likes of Harvey Weinstein
and Kevin Spacey, but that just can’t be
the case here.
For one thing, in 2001, when this behavior
seems to have began, Louis CK was by no means
the superstar he was at the time of his downfall.
He didn’t have the kind of professional
leverage these men had, and he wasn’t physically
forcing himself on these women.
Many are asking the question of what the proportionate
punishment for his actions should be.
It’s not a question with a decisive answer,
but public humiliation that will overshadow
his career and live in infamy long after he’s
gone might be that punishment.
We can speculate about how privy to his behavior
the people who are now attacking him were
while it was happening, especially given that
these rumors were widespread internally years
ago.
This has often been the case with MeToo revelations.
There’s no doubt that some of his most proudly
outraged critics in the comedy world that
were aware only now heap upon him either because
it saves face publicly or because they think
it absolves of them of guilt.
Either way, the perversion of the entertainment
industry doesn’t come near to beginning
or ending with Louis CK.
To borrow from our first video, Hurricane
Harvey, on the Weinstein case that brought
this deluge of sexual scandals forward, it
was certainly the case that nearly every Hollywood
power broker knew of his vile acts for years
and years--doing nothing for the sake of landing
another primetime role.
Celebrity after knowing celebrity would wait
in the wings until someone with a large enough
profile would tell them that the water’s
warm, and that they can finally puff their
chests out and heroically add to the chorus
of truth-tellers.
As by now we all know, this is a uniquely
grotesque, cowardly, and self-servicing industry.
There’s an obviously freeing element to
this for Louis, though, and he summarized
it better than anyone else by asking offended
audience members the question: “What are
you going to do, take away my Birthday?”
This gives him the liberating license to joke
about the policy ignorance of teenagers and
to even mention trans folk in a funny way,
as though you should need that sort of license
in the first place.
Anyone who has had their careers tanked by
the professionally offended already know this
feeling well, even if it’s new to Louis.
It’s why the comedy world is now stunted,
and why you see comedian after comedian from
Bill Burr, Joe Rogan, Joey Diaz and others
complain about it endlessly--and these people
aren’t right-wingers.
They were people who could take a joke, and
understood that a joke is what takes the sting
out of otherwise painful subjects.
People like Apatow simply don’t get this,
and as more people become rapidly aware of
this fact, and as the tides turn against his
fossilized brand of “humor”, we’ll have
a more forgiving, measured, and funny world.
Even though his set at the governor's club
wasn’t mean to be broadcast to the outside
world, this is a gamble that could play in
Louis’ favor.
Inauthentic outrage rarely sticks, and because
the politicized anger isn’t even about his
scandals per se, fans of having a sense of
humor could very well reject hypocritically
moral finger-wagging.
If ever we do see Louis selling out stadiums
again, we can thank elite moral gatekeepers
like Apatow, who would like to see socially
polite sensitivity dictate what’s funny.
