Louis
Facebook post (slightly adapted) from August 28.
Louis CK performed at the Comedy Cellar on Sunday night. A female writer on Facebook weighed in that he had not sufficiently redeemed himself to get back on stage. The language of Christian morality and the model of fall and redemption do not sit well with me. We don’t fall, and we don’t need to be redeemed. We are not on a path with an ideal narrative arc of right living. We are not on a path, period. You don’t like Louis? Don’t go see Louis. Some people complained his appearance wasn’t announced. It’s a tradition in comedy clubs for stars to do surprise sets to try out new work. Granted, this situation was different. In clubs, if you don’t like an act, you can walk out and come back. You’re not in lock down. What people who complained meant is they wanted a trigger warning. Comedy is the thing that lampoons trigger warnings and other forms of pre-emptive protection. Comedy is the thing that is supposed to take you hostage and unteach you how to be.
You want to tell Louis about the pain his actions and comedy cause? Tell him. Maybe he will hear you. Maybe he will want to cause less pain. His job is to be funny. I don’t find sexist humor funny because the power position in comedy is the place of no power. Louis knows this some of the time. The way we all do. This post is not about how accomplished Louis is as a comedian and writer. At times he can switch moods in startling ways, slipping quickly between hilarity, embarrassment, failure, and yearning. This post protests pressuring people to right-think and right-speak. I believe in Me-too. Don’t go nuts on me, here. Louis is an artist. He wants to work. His work is performing and writing. He’s got to show up somewhere. Some people said, “No, he doesn’t have to show up somewhere.” I say: I don’t want to see a single person in the GOP and most democrats appearing in public. Can you help me with that?
Then this happened.
In response to this post, people said I was a bad feminist and that I was hurting the cause of the women Louis harmed. I offered this homework assignment: Is Louis a shitty person who is a good artist or a shitty artist who is also a shitty person? If you think the second thing, is there a relationship between his actions in the world and the limits of his art? If you believe this, figure out how to critique his art using aesthetic and formal criteria rather than moral or evaluative language. Again, this is for you to ponder or share on your own posts. Thanks.
No one did their homework. The post was over-run by stories of Louis’ serial masturbating and by calls for him to reform, lay bare his bad soul, and pay reparations to the women who were harmed by the horrible appearance of his penis. There were calls for Louis to pay the women who might in future be harmed and to pay all women harmed by the patriarchy that grants a pass to men like Louis while the careers of women are stunted. I abandoned this post and wrote another one.
Louis Again
Facebook post (slightly adapted) from September 1
People who hate what I wrote about Louis CK, write your own posts. You are in the majority. You will receive a lot of affirmation. Personally, I don’t want people pressured to speak a certain way, ever. I don’t believe in political education. Nothing is intrinsically funny or unfunny. Laughter is the only aesthetic response we have that is not mediated by moral structures. It’s reflexive. You laugh, you don’t laugh. It issues from the deepest sense in us of hearing truth and often an uncomfortable truth we may find ourselves disgusted to register. Will Louis have anything to say we may wish to hear if he performs as if nothing has happened to him? I think he could turn his behavior into a subject in the context of comedy if he wanted to, if he were ready to, if he wanted to struggle creatively with such a story. How was he feeling when he whipped out his cock on unsuspecting women? What did the looks on their faces tell him? How does he feel about the impact of all this on his daughters?
Should people who have experienced abuse have space to publicize what happened to them? Of course. Should they have increasing space? Yes, yes. If Louis performs, does that disqualify the credibility of the women he slimed? I don’t think so. It’s not a scarcity matter. Militating for the banning of expression you find offensive in no way serves the cause of women’s greater freedom to speak and act in the world. It harms it. How to help women speak publicly against abuse without being consigned to the role of scold or gravitating toward it? Women need to find forms of expression that don’t confuse categories. It’s hard, but I think we can do it.
Not about Louis.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote and acted in a 6-part Brit comedy called Crashing in 2016. It’s on Netflix. I loved it. She plays Lulu, a sister of Fleabag, a little less teetering on a broken wire. Brilliant dirty mind, kidding not kidding humor. If I were writing about comedy, I would rhapsodize about her and try to situate her with Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais. She has tenderness and pain where they have savagery that can wake up in bed with sentimentality.