When Bill Cosby's Victims started speaking
out against him back in 2014, it completely
ruined his comedy for me.
I don't think I'll ever be able to watch a
clip from his act or the Cosby show ever again
without immediately thinking of sexual assault,
and that in combination with Cosby's style,
that squeaky clean wholesome family stuff
gives me such a sense of vertigo through the
sheer contrast.
The thought that America's dad, that this
guy who wouldn't use profanity and criticized
sagging jeans was also the guy with a pocket
full of Quaaludes at the ready, I just can't
reconcile those two things in my head.
Pudding pops and date rape drugs just can't
exist in the same universe for me, one dissolves
the other.
Every joke Bill Cosby ever made feels like
a lie now.
These days my problem is very simple, it's
trying to find a place in my house where I
can masturbate without somebody bothering
me, And that's getting really difficult.
This video isn't about Bill Cosby though,
it's about Louis CK and why I think his sex
scandal will have a different impact from
Cosby's.
I'm still not quite sure what to think about
the scandal itself.
Louis getting women to watch him masturbate
makes a very different impression on me than
the stories about Harvey Weinstein and Kevin
Spacey straight up assaulting people.
What Louis did strikes me as much more ambiguous
and, frankly, pathetic.
If what he did was sexual assault, then it
was a weirdly passive-aggressive sort of assault,
and at risk of sympathizing with the abuser,
it just made me feel more pity and embarrassment
than outright anger.
In any case, I don't want to defend what he
did.
What I do want to say, however, is that what
Louis CK did, that part of himself, is inscribed
in his work.
I don't feel any of the cognitive dissonance
watching him now that I feel when I watch
Cosby's stuff, I don't feel like I'm being
lied to.
When we watch Louis CK, we're getting the
real guy, hairy palms and all.
Louis CK's act has always been a show of both
exhibitionism and self-flagellation, it's
always been about getting an audience to laugh
at what a pathetic sad sack he is.
I think that whatever it is inside Louis that
made him want to expose himself on stage is
also what made him expose himself in front
of those women.
I mean, I wasn't there, but I can't imagine
like it was some macho, aggressive thing.
It just sounded like a sad joke from out of
his act, Louis sitting there awkwardly handling
himself, strategically positioned in front
of the door to keep the women from just walking out.
Putting himself in front of the door like
that, trying to prevent someone from leaving
without having to actually physically restrain
them, stands out in particular to me.
It's like he had to bluff, using his own image
as a big intimidating man because he knew
there was nothing he was prepared to do if
they actually tried to leave.
That strange duality of not yourself being
an aggressive person and yet still passively
enjoying the benefits of an intimidating image
is something that Louis has commented on before
in his work.
My favorite example comes from the show he
self-funded and released last year,
Horace and Pete.
Horace and Pete is about a family-owned bar
in Brooklyn, and I like to think of it as
a sitcom turned inside out into a drama.
It's a show that critically examines a lot
of the social issues that power the laughs
in a comedy like Cheers or All in the Family.
I want to focus on Louis' role in the show
as an actor.
In Horace and Pete, Louis plays two parts:
He plays the lackadaisical, loser owner who
inherited the bar and is having trouble keeping
things afloat, and he also plays his first
character's own father in an extended flashback
set in 1976.
The son is very similar to the persona Louis
CK presents while up on stage.
He's melancholic and apathetic, he just kinda
tripped into his current job and his family
situation, and while he's not overtly aggressive
or malicious, he consistently hurts others
through his ignorance and lack of willpower.
Hi honey, I keep going to voicemail when I
call you and then you keep texting me, and
I really don't want to text with you, so can
you please not text and pick up the phone,
okay?
Thank you.
When Louis plays the father however, he plays
a much more old school kind of abusive.
As the father, Louis CK is just straight up
terrifying, none of this passive-aggressive
stuff.
He has no qualms about using physical force
to knock his family into line.
I told ya to cut your hair.
What's kind of eerie is how well Louis was
able to play both roles, he projected the
image of that old school abusive dad perfectly.
That Louis was willing to play the abusive
father in addition to his normal dopey self
shows us a certain self-awareness, I think.
Louis is like the son in the show, he's just
not the kind of person to brute force someone
into doing what he wants.
However, when those young comics looked at
him, they didn't see the son, they saw the
father, they saw a big guy with a lot of authority
in their profession, someone who had a lot
of power to hurt them both physically and
socially.
Louis CK might not be Harvey Weinstein, but
he looked enough like him to coerce a half-willing
consent, and it's this image that Louis used
to barricade the door.
All of this is to acknowledge that Louis CK
is a flawed person.
The reason I still respect him as an artist,
however, is because he was willing to own
those flaws, both directly in the statement
he released and indirectly through his work.
Louis CK's great virtue as an artist is his
willingness to turn out the worst parts of
himself in his comedy, it's all there in his
work.
I think there's a real value in being able
to confront yourself like that, I think it
makes for good art and it helps us to understand
the human condition a little better.
Whatever happens to Louis CK because of this
scandal, I will still be there to watch his
old body of work and anything new he develops
in the coming years.
You said you regret it, why do you regret
it?
You've said worse things and not taken them
back.
Well, I don't take it back, I regret it, there's
a difference.
I mean, if you went back and fixed all the
mistakes you made, you erase yourself.
There's no point to that.
