It’s not just that it’s not funny
It seems Louis CK is back, and Matthew Dessem at Slate has heard the bootlegged tape.
And what he’s been up to, judging from the material, is bemoaning the money he lost, fuming over young people and political correctness, and writing some really killer jokes about the respective penis sizes of various ethnic groups. It’s not just that it’s not funny: it’s positively sickening. Here, for example, is the way C.K. ends a bit about visiting his doctor (described earlier in the joke as old, and Jewish, and touchy-feely):
And he said, “You need to stop eating ice cream.” I said, “You need to go fuck yourself. And don’t ever touch me again, you old faggot. You old fucking Jewish fag. Get your fucking hands off me.” You’re fucking with my ice cream, I get upset.
Transgressive. Or is it just – you know – what it looks like? Venom?
Whatever you think about C.K.’s past use of slurs in his act, his old material at least made some attempt to think about what they meant. There’s no payoff here except for the slur itself: The entire joke is that he’s so mad about not being able to eat ice cream that he’ll casually use it, even with someone who—as he spends the whole build-up establishing—he otherwise likes. It’s cheap and it’s hacky. But it has nothing on the five solid minutes (!) he devotes to lamenting the fact that people have stopped using the word retarded. After reminiscing about how often people said it during his childhood—and saying it over and over again himself, sometimes in a comically exaggerated Boston accent—he lands on this:
But we started to feel shitty about it, so we changed it to intellectually challenged. What the fuck, it’s—don’t name the kid a thing he can’t say out loud. An intellectual challenge is can you translate Shakespeare into Latin and make it rhyme. These kids are not intellectually challenged, they’re intellectually fuckin’ done. They are! It’s not their sport!
Etcetera.
C.K. is doing a George Carlin thing, acting like he’s telling forbidden truths, but spends five minutes riffing on “Christ, people with intellectual disabilities are stupid.” So stupid, in fact, that, according to C.K., “They don’t give a fuck what you think of them,” if anyone was looking for a permission slip to go back to using a slur. And speaking of people who don’t give a fuck what you think of them, Louis C.K. is such a rebel that he doesn’t give a fuck what you think of him, as he made clear, seemingly in response to someone leaving or giving him a dirty look around four minutes into his killer material at the expense of the intellectually disabled:
What’re you, gonna take away my birthday? My life is over, I don’t give a shit. You can, you can be offended, it’s OK. You can get mad at me. Anyway. So why do black guys have big dicks? Let’s talk about that for a minute.
He’ll probably be Trump’s next press secretary.
“My life is over” == For about a year, it was prudent for me to lie low and live off my accumulated millions before returning with a new comedy special that would make me more money
“My life is over” – get the eff over yourself. Richard Pryor set himself on fire and went on to do brilliant comedy about, you know, setting himself on fire. Then he did some great bits about having MS. Mr. CK, grow the fuck up.
Comparing Louis to George is like comparing a vomited turd to a fucking nebula or a rainbow. You just don’t do it.
It’s currently available here:
https://youtu.be/R8Nc3x_TkF4
You either like his kind of humor or you don’t. I’m not super familiar with his work, but I’ve seen enough to say this isn’t much different from his usual stuff. I’ve seen people claiming he’s radically changing his act to appeal to the alt-right, and that’s quite frankly just ridiculous.
He does a lot of shock jokes, so it’s easy to pull a few lines out here and there and make him look like a monster. You could have done that with his old material, and you could do that with probably most comics. Amy Schumer, who most see as a solid progressive (I take no stance), used to tell jokes like, “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.” Chris Rock did an extended bit where he didn’t condone OJ Simpson killing his wife, “but I understand”.
The Slate writer seems to miss the point of the “retarded” bit, which was that the terminology was changed to make the people changing it feel better about themselves rather than to actually help the people so labeled.
I think the real issue is people don’t think Louis CK deserves a comeback after what he did. That is of course a perfectly valid stance. I think it’s strange that people also feel compelled to say his comedy’s now very different and much worse. You take out the revelations of his vile behavior between his old acts and this act, and nobody would have noticed this alleged transition to a different style of comedy. If you don’t think he deserves a comeback, just stick with that.
Skeletor,
I’ll thank you not to tell me what I *really* think. I’m quite familiar with CK’s body of work, and I believe this is quite different. And I was quite prepared for him to have a comeback, and frankly hoping for it. Sorry for having an opinion that differs from yours. Perhaps you can find some minor factual point in my post to nitpick instead, since that seems to bring you such joy.
Yeah, I’m with Skeletor. I’m not seeing much difference.
But then, I never liked him much. Not because he was “edgy”–I like a lot of that stuff.
Something about CK always put me off.
Frankly, though, I think the “an intellectual challenge” line is funny. And no, I don’t think that means we should bring back “retard” as a slur. I don’t think CK thinks so, either.
And listening to that set, I think Dessem misrepresented both of the bits he quoted from.