Louis CK’s new comedy special is the last thing we need to subject ourselves to amid coronavirus lockdowns
Disgraced stand-up comic Louis C.K., in an unexpected move, dropped a surprise new comedy special on his website. Titled ‘Sincerely C.K.’, the special, which is streaming and available for purchase on the comedian’s website for $7.99, is, in C.K.’s words, for “those who need to laugh”. In a newsletter update, C.K. said that the special is intended to bring joy into people’s lives during a time of global crisis when everyone’s on quarantine.
It’s his first produced special since his 2017 Netflix stand-up special. That year, the New York Times released a report in which several women claimed C.K. used his power as an influential stand-up comic to sexually harass and intimidate them. The report detailed the accounts of five women. The incidents spanned the mid-’90s to 2005. Each woman recounted remarkably similar situations in which C.K. either asked them to watch him masturbate or forced them to do so.
C.K. wrote about the new special: “I feel like there are two kinds of people in this world. One kind needs to laugh when things get sh*tty. In fact, the sh*ttier things get, the more serious, the more dark, the more terrifying, the more dangerous and dire anything is, the more important it is to laugh in the midst of it and often directly in its face,” adding that he belonged to this category.
In the wake of near-global lockdowns caused by the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus, when people are cooped up inside their homes, experiencing early signs of cabin fever, laughter sounds like a good idea on paper. But does that laughter require any contribution from Louis C.K.? Not really.
That the sexual harasser comic, who was prior to the accusations one of the biggest names in the industry, has become a better person since 2017 is questionable. Yes, he issued a statement that read, “I have been remorseful of my actions. And I’ve tried to learn from them... I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen.” But in 2019, in what was perhaps his first acknowledgment of the allegations on stage, C.K. chose to make a joke that was decidedly unfunny. He said, “I like to jerk off, and I don’t like being alone.”
The comedian (or as anti-gun-violence advocate Cameron Kasky refers to him, “professional jerk”) did not just make jokes about how he sexually harassed women, he also made jokes about survivors of the shooting that took place at Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida. He said, “You’re not interesting because you went to a high school where kids got shot. Why does that mean I have to listen to you? Why does that make you interesting? You didn’t get shot, you pushed some fat kid in the way, and now I gotta listen to you talking?”
He’s also made a joke on the backlash he received from the Parkland school shooting jokes, that was a joke on how he sexually harassed women: “If you ever need people to forget that you jerked off, what you do is you make a joke about kids that got shot.”
C.K. has also not really stopped himself from having an opinion about people who don’t conform to the gender binary and their preferred pronouns. “They’re like royalty, they tell you what to call them,” C.K. joked. “‘You should address me as they/them because I identify as gender-neutral.’ Oh, O.K. You should address me as ‘there,’ because I identify as a location. And the location is your mother’s c**t.”
It’s arguable that C.K.’s particularly bellicose strain of humor hasn’t really changed from what it was because of the allegations leveled against him. Making offensive jokes was always something of a specialty of C.K. And it is a genre of humor -- had it not been, Anthony Jeselnik may just have starved to death. But all the jokes that he made in the last couple of years somehow seem to not be intentioned for humor at all. They seem to be his bitterness coming to life.
As Scott Simon of NPR notes, “I don't believe Louis C.K. should be censored or publicly shamed into perpetual unemployment. People can choose to see him or not. But in these times, when comedy can be idealized as edgy, audacious and truth-telling, we can forget: It begins with a calling to be funny. Otherwise, a comic is no more interesting than any other muttering blowhard who craves attention.”
Being a curmudgeon is not a personality, even though Louis C.K. has worked hard to legitimize it as one. But when you are locked up inside homes, unable to do things and meet friends and have fun, do you really think the bitter ramblings of an increasingly-unfunny comic will help? Not really.
