Louie (Louis C.K.'s show on FX)

im not blaming the people for not coming forward to say they think louis' show was bad, its a critique of ilx's attitude towards this sort of stuff IN GENERAL not at individuals IN SPECIFIC

also fuck you wins

And DJP for that matter. want to talk about reading someone in bad faith?

i also think the convo that followed my point where ppl tried to engage w/ what they did and didnt like about his material, and why, in more depth, was a good adjustment for the weird dissociated vibe i was getting on the thread, the strange disconnect between the pre- and post- NYTimes piece discussion

MRA guys have a very frustrated relationship with Louis, Burr, Rogen etc. They're often viewed as traitors, cowards and that other C word.

RAG, I think you're right. MRA guys love the "bitches, maaaaan!" stuff but don't like it when the comedybro turns his gaze on them, or on anybody who might kinda be like them.

Thread took a dark turn. People are talking about Patton Oswalt but not mentioning his name? Not accusing him but, all the same...? What even is this?

xp I am thinking of a Louis CK bit where he's talking about someone who "needs" to get from the extreme right lane to the extreme left turn lane in heavy traffic. He mocks the expressions and attitudes of the person going "(shrug!) What else can I do? I gotta get over there." With something like a certified-real-talk admonition to JUST GO ONE MORE BLOCK, ASSHOLE or something like that.

And yet he cannot make the connection between his takedown of the must-turn-left-from-the-right-lane driver and his own problem. Which is must-masturbate-in-front-of-women-even-though-I-hate-myself-for-needing-to.

It's a curious mental obstacle that he can't apply the same logic to himself: GAH, just memorize what the women look like and go masturbate alone to the image of her in your head, sheesh. (Which is still incredibly creepy but comparatively benign.)

People are talking about Patton Oswalt but not mentioning his name? Not accusing him but, all the same...? What even is this

lol yeah I didn't get this either

I apologize for that digression; I was reacting to Simon's assertion that he would be surprised if another comedy weirdo went super famous after this and my first thought was "but this dude's star is rising and rising". I did not mean to imply that I thought he had skeletons in his closet and I didn't use his name because I didn't want a searchable artifact on this thread directly linking his name to innuendo and allegations.

I probably should not have lengthened that digression

I genuinely thought I'd missed some oblique reference wrt #metoo about him. Thanks for clearing it up Dan.

yeah i was pretty confused/dismayed

A law expert could perhaps help me on this: if the victims of CK's harassment would sue him, would their cases be strong? Considering he admitted in public and whatnot? Is it worth it? I mean there needs to be justice at one point. If after all these allegations he can get away with just one poor letter and a hiatus of a few years it is back to square one.

i don't think he committed the crime "sexual harassment". indecent exposure / sexual assault / false imprisonment are more plausible.

i don't really think CK's legend was all that rare and someone could easily come along to replace him. yeah someone who write and shoots and edits may have been a rarity in the old media paradigm but we will only see more of those as times goes on and the internet continues to supplant old media. imo a big part of his legend was more about the form of his comedy: the constant invoking of cinema verite, the DIY-ness of his brand, him getting the final cut, the distribution channels, etc. rather than the content. the only piece of comedy people really got into was a rant he did on a talk show.

TL;DR no big loss

he probably gets more props for being a marketing guru than anything. i think his standing is far hollower than most make it out to be.

i don't really think CK's legend was all that rare and someone could easily come along to replace him. yeah someone who write and shoots and edits may have been a rarity in the old media paradigm but we will only see more of those as times goes on and the internet continues to supplant old media. imo a big part of his legend was more about the form of his comedy: the constant invoking of cinema verite, the DIY-ness of his brand, him getting the final cut, the distribution channels, etc. rather than the content. the only piece of comedy people really got into was a rant he did on a talk show.

TL;DR no big loss

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, November 14, 2017 7:28 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is the kind of nonsense i was talking about upthread tbh

he probably gets more props for being a marketing guru than anything. i think his standing is far hollower than most make it out to be.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, November 14, 2017 7:29 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we get it adam, youre not a sex predator

i don't think he committed the crime "sexual harassment". indecent exposure / sexual assault / false imprisonment are more plausible.

― reggae mike love (polyphonic), Tuesday, November 14, 2017 8:14 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes i meant sexual assault. my bad.

he committed the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress, among possible others

i'd sue him

I don't think Adam's argument is too far off the mark - he didn't become LOUIS CK until the auteur TV show and distributing a standup special in a novel way. Before that he was a top tier standup but not way beyond someone like Patton Oswalt or David Cross in recognition.

lol OK, the LCK brand isn’t quite at the level it was a few years ago, but that Adam read is a ridiculous underselling

Louis CK is pretty prolific considering that some stand ups come up with a routine and ride it out for a career and this guy was coming up with a near new show every year. I've seen a few comedians marvel at how he could come up with a new show every year.

The critical acclaim it received as also not some mass delusion inasmuch as it would be nice to believe

I didn’t finish that post but I forgot what I was going to say. The first part stands though

i haven't been following the arguments in this thread too closely because life is precious etc but i think if i'm reading deej right: yeah, there are a lot of ppl (myself among them) that really thought he was a genuinely good comedian (in part because he seemed to have mostly-good politics most of the time) and might be reluctant to admit it now, retconning our mild concern at earlier allegations into "well I knew it all along" certainty

I don't think Adam's argument is too far off the mark - he didn't become LOUIS CK until the auteur TV show and distributing a standup special in a novel way. Before that he was a top tier standup but not way beyond someone like Patton Oswalt or David Cross in recognition.

― louise ck (milo z), Tuesday, November 14, 2017 8:12 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also i don't think this is accurate: before the auteur tv show he was still regarded as "a comic's comic" and had a rep that was different in kind, if not wide recognition, than most others

yeah i have no problem admitting that i was 100% a fool, I let me my fandom blind me and should have believed these women. lesson learned.

The problem was (as Maron pointed out) there was no 'these women' for the longest time. It was just hints and allegations and blind items with no names attached. I totally understand why that was the case, but it's difficult to judge a person's alleged actions when nothing is at all explicit. That said, I was pretty much just waiting to see if the hammer was going to fall once Weinstein got the ball rolling and, welp.

maybe it's just my perception, I don't follow the comedy world closely except for watching Netflix or HBO specials here and there

but his rise, to me, seemed to coincide with Chapelle's self exile period, and it seemed like he filled that role of most important comic that Chappelle had vacated

I feel like he poured himself into "the stand-up comic's stand-up comic" role, and suffering over every last detail of his show, and making a big deal about trying to be a good single father (I have no idea if he was/is or not), because he knew he was/is a terrible dirtbag. And then he hoped it would never come up, like he could just work it away. In the end this is all really sad. He was an awful person as soon as he got a taste of fortune, and then he was great for a while, and a lot of us got a ton of laughs out of it. Everything about it is shameful, and the victims deserve the greatest sympathy. There is no debate that they got the worst of this. His family has to be going through hell, his friends are dealing with hell, he's going to hell in a fucking handbasket, and for anybody whoever laughed until they cried at some of his stuff, like me, I guess we're in limbo. For a decade and a half he tried to hide a shit show, and now we're all in it.

This is in the same galaxy as how I felt about Cosby, btw; his fucking sickness ruined a lot of my childhood, but I have other reasons to distance myself from all that, namely, I no longer talk to anyone who was involved in my childhood. Louis CK was a comic I got to enjoy as an adult, in my thirties, and I chose to DVR all the shit he did, and buy tickets, etc.

I've seen a few comedians marvel at how he could come up with a new show every year.

this is the norm in Australia and England and Scotland btw

Every standup ever (good people, bad people, etc) has that over-display of private matters (unless they are pure character e.g. Emo) which even if fictionalised must be hugely irritating to that family member that is being xcoriated for comedy value.

standup comedy sucks

OK what did we do to cause treeship 2

Yeah a show a year has been absolutely the norm in the UK for decades. Izzard had like four completely different 90 minute shows on VHS between 93 and 97 and the last of those he toured France with *in French*.

there are more jokes in Europe tbf

Eddie Izzard certainly qualifies as a joke

Wondering if CK will talk about childhood abuse at some point (though I don't assume he'll talk about anything for a long time). It would make sense if someone else in authority normalizing sexuality would set a standard for this.

I definitely was one of the "on board with Louis CK after 'Louie.'" His standup...I've enjoyed it, but it also reminds me of guys I know of his age who create a context of pornography around daily life: the default way to joke, the seamy underbelly of normal situations, and so on. The same impulse that made for the whole Blue Velvet era of "there's darkness under all of this suburban American gloss." Which is of course true - but some of that is consumerism, and some of that is abuse. (Still thinking this through.)

UK comedians are also busy pushing the moral boundaries of offshore banking (Jimmy Carr, Mrs Brown's Boys)

id forgotten abt the era of louie that dylannn brought back upthread, i never thought he was vile then just unfunny and ignorable up and thru lucky louie really

i know Dublin-born Brendan O'Carroll has many criticisms aimed at him but i don't think being a UK comedian is one of them

this old article on the other louie thread is an interesting read btw - Come anticipate Louis C.K.s HBO sitcom LUCKY LOUIE with me

a sitcom w swearing in 2005 was a big deal

Louis also bore the hopes of maybe we can have guys who think about stuff and also lust and also think about their lust, maybe we can build something out in the no-man's land between men who've been fucked up by being men and women who are understandably tired with Men in general.

(maura otm in the Weinstein thread)

Andrew otm here. Stephen King said years ago that he used horror novels to get all his anger and general weirdness out of him. I guess, for people like me, there was a hope that CK was engaging in a discussion about his desires instead of being a massive creep. Oh well.

Course, Stephen King could well turn out to be a massive creep as well, because obviously we can't have normal, non-horrendous things.

i mean... i think he *was* engaging in a discussion about his desires, but he was also living in tony soprano style state of dissocation

at some level i think his work was dishonest & is completely recontextualized by this information

in other ways i think he was speaking to something extremely real and true about himself and human nature generally, i dont think his success was a figment of this deception

i can easily see an alternate universe LCK who *never* became a predator having the exact same material and people continuing to nod along and say "this, so much this" in response for the rest of his career. anyone feeling like they were overlooking something, well, i don't know about that. i think a lot of his shady material is so deeply embedded in our culture that it's very easy to overlook at least for men. the material that bugged me about him wasn't the same thing that might bother women. or rather, what would bother them might be aspects i wouldn't even notice because i'm not the one being targeted. you can probably call a lot of dude comedian material about women micro-aggressive comedy.