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.