Ladies and Gentlemen, Please! It’s Louis C.K.
The Rise of the (Not-So) Everyman.
The earliest memory I have of Louis C.K. wasn’t a memory of Louis C.K. until a few years ago when he really started getting big. What I mean is, there was a comedian that I thought was funny, but until Louis C.K. became Louis C.K. he was just this guy on that one episode of Comedy Central Presents.
I remember the bit, it was the last one in the half-hour, and it started with being stuck in traffic. Some guy is honking his horn behind him, but traffic isn’t moving. The guy keeps honking and eventually gets out of his car to yell at Louie. But since arguing about traffic is pointless, he begins to argue about a jacket: “give me back my coat, you’re stretching it out.” The man, befuddled, goes back to his car.
Something about that bit really stuck with me. The absurdity of this defense mechanism was, in a word, hilarious. I was so enthralled with this joke, I did what any teenager would do immediately after hearing it— I started using against other people.
I’d be in the middle of a stupid argument, when out of nowhere; “give me back my coat.” Sometimes I wouldn’t even be arguing. There was one time I just kept asking this guy for my coat back. He was perplexed, to say the least, and was very upset that I would accuse him of this. He probably thought I was insane.
This went on for two months until I re-watched the Mitch Hedberg episode and started in about frozen bananas.
It has been a crazy few years for Louis C.K. He’s in movies by Woody Allen and David O. Russell. He’s selling out shows across the nation. His television show on FXX, Louie, is a national treasure. He’s producing shows for other people now. He’s been so wildly successful as a comedian that tabloids are now following him.
Some of this success has to do with his brilliant stand-up, following in the footsteps of comedy legend George Carlin by writing a new hour every year. Some of it, I’m sure, has to do with his television and movies, including the just released from the vault Tomorrow Night. But a lot of it, I would bet, has to do with his everyman status.
Here’s a guy that can riff on bags of dicks and why farts are funny, but also how to be a father and the cognitive dissonance of American culture. He’s part-Carlin, part-Cosby, but wholly new. And I would match every bet that he isn’t an everyman. Because he, like Carlin and Cosby, is a special, once-in-a-lifetime performer.
I was shocked to find out that Louie got his break in the early nineties at Late Night with Conan O’Brien—almost as shocked as I was to find out that Conan worked on The Simpsons for a few seasons. But that’s how he did it, writing bits for other people’s shows. He’d work with Dana Carvey and Chris Rock on their eponymous shows, winning an Emmy for writing on the latter. But he had already been making films for quite some time.
Using what money he made from gigs or friends, Louie would make shorts like “Ice Cream” (embedded to the left), a 13-minute long tribute to the stylings of Woody Allen and David Lynch. It follows a couple as they have and try to get rid of a child, only to die in a horrific car accident.
The film plays out in non-sequiturs, one minute the couple has just married the next there is a baby. This sparse dialogue and dead looks only amplify the absurdity of the film. But really, down at the core of the film, it’s about the absurdity of life. Couple meets, has kids, then dies. And this is to become a theme of his career.
Others like “Hello There” and “The Legend of Willie Brown” were produced for a short lived Howie Mandel sketch comedy show on Showtime. In the same vein as “Ice Cream,” they poked fun at tropes and normalcy. The first concerned a group of men that communicate via tape recorders hung around their necks, and the second about a Jazz legend that couldn’t play.
Louie’s style was solidifying, inspired by the American directors above, and also the visual influence of French New Wave and other directors like Fellini and Buñuel, but also screenwriting influence from playwrights in the Theatre of the Absurd. The jazz would play in the background of a black and white scene, and the dialogue would progress naturally into unknown territory, leaving the viewer laughing at his/her own confusion.
By 1998, he had enough experience directing, writing, and editing shorts, he decided he needed a full feature under his belt. He started production on a film about a man who masturbates with a bowl of ice cream and marries an old lady. That movie, Tomorrow Night, would feature future stars Steve Carrell and Amy Poehler in small roles, while other writers like Chuck Sklar and JB Smoove would take leading roles.
The movie initially couldn’t find a distributor, Louie began selling it yesterday—sixteen years later—on his website for five dollars. And though it may not be 8 1/2, it’s certainly an interesting stepping stone for him on his way to becoming the director we know and love today.
And while that movie stayed in a vault, many people felt that the next movie he made should have: Pootie Tang. Once again dealing with the absurd, but this time from the lens of Blaxploitation films, Louie wrote and directed this film based on a sketch from The Chris Rock Show. And, even though Louie himself derides the movie as a failure, it seems to have taken on the spirit of a cult classic mainly due to the absurdity of the main character.
It was in 2001 that both Pootie Tang and the special with the “give me back my coat” came out. And it must have been a decisive year for him because after this point, being in the business for over a decade, his career started heading in a positive direction.
Louie was always a stand-up while doing these writing and directing gigs. The only problem was he had been doing the same bit over and over and over again. He relays the history of the fifteen year trial of getting an hour together at an event honoring his hero George Carlin.
And it must have been around the early 2000s that he finally reached that point. Many of his early stand-up routines available to watch on the internet show this fumbling comic trying to co-erce people into laughing.
With “One Night Stand” on HBO, Louie veered from traffic jams to his damnation and how much his wife hates him. He’s no longer telling jokes, but stories. He’s making people laugh. And this was just the first in a long line of increasingly funny stand-ups.
By Shameless, his first full hour special on HBO, he was inserting stories reminiscent of his film shorts, like the man who makes him a sandwich without asking what kind he wanted. Or trading a friend’s life for knowledge that he could predict the future.
Some of the jokes take a darker turn, told more for the shock factor than laughs. Bits on rape, misanthropy, and bad parenting. He was preparing us for a future in which he was not afraid to tackle topics that are considered taboo. And this is particularly true of his next special Chewed Up.
He starts this show in the same way that Carlin started his Carnegie Hall show—with a bang. And in an ode to Carlin, he riffs on three very dirty words, none of which I will say here because I’m not Louie. But his critique of American culture (and linguistics) is pointed and powerful. Like the abyss, the more we focus on Louie, the more Louie points it back on us.
He took a break from stand-up specials briefly in 2009, but only to start his eponymous show, Louie. From the moment it premiered, there was a certain understanding that this was something special. Some of the episode themes could have been ripped from The Cosby Show, the importance of visiting family, fatherly advice and the like. The rest is, well, strange.
But this isn’t the first time Louie had a t.v. show to himself. Lucky Louie aired on HBO in 2006. And for good reason. It wasn’t Louie. The episodes lacked the charm and absurdity of his standup, and were old hat by sitcom standards. That isn’t to say the acting or writing—or anything really—was lacking, but there was a consensus that it just wasn’t good. It was cancelled after only one season, and they didn’t even air the finale.
Learning from Lucky Louie’s mistakes, when FX decided to give him another try in 2009, he needed full creative control, and got it. The story goes they gave him $200,000 for a pilot and to prove that he could make a great show with that much money, he included a helicopter. He wrote, edited, directed, and starred in the episode, which had more of a short film feel than sitcom—the term he and others had used is vignettes. And by the end of the first season, accolades started pouring in.
He took some of the Lucky Louie team along with him, with Pamela Adlon, his wife on the former show, a consulting producer on this show, and his love interest in many of the episodes. And by the guest stars list, he took many of his friends along with him:
It is really because of the Louie that we are talking about his career now. When he announced that he was taking a break before the fourth season, there was a collective groan. The reason he gave for doing so was because he wanted the show to stay funny. But that hasn’t stopped him from doing stand-up, and using his newfound success he started toying around with ideas on distribution.
After he recorded his new hour of standup, Live at the Beacon Theatre, Louie had the ingenious idea of selling it directly to his fans—for five dollars. No extravagant packaging or exorbitant pricing. To say the least, plenty of fans thought that was a reasonable amount to pay. He made well over a million dollars. But Louie being Louie, instead of giving himself all the profits, he gave bonuses to the entire staff and donated 25% to various charities.
After the success of using his website to sell directly to his fans, Louie decided to go after nefarious ticketing practices and tried to get a better ticket prices. He toured in specific locations and made sure that every ticket was the same price—$45—and that it would be hard for scalpers to rip people off on secondary markets. By some accounts, he cut scalping by 96% in every show that he sold through his website.
Until his show returns, we have his latest stand-up, also being sold for five dollars, Oh My God! If you will notice, it was recorded at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix, Ariz. It is one of those theaters that has the stage in the center, not at one end. And if it looks familiar, there is a reason for that. It’s the same theatre where George Carlin recorded a special. Louie practically even wore the same thing as Carlin did.
I believe Louie is trying to tell us something. He sees himself with the greats, and he’s forcing you to draw that conclusion. And it’s hard not to agree: from the critically acclaimed shows, to the critically acclaimed movies, to the critically acclaimed stand-up, it seems he can do no wrong. Everything he puts his hands on turns to gold.
There seems to be no end in sight for Louis C.K. He’s too good, almost too good to be considered the everyman. And it’s not that we see a little bit of us in him, we all want to see a little bit of him in us.
