The Stand-Up Comedy of Louis CK

Louis CK is one of my favorite stand-up comedians. His comedy, like that of George Carlin and Bill Hicks and many others, toes the line between comedy and philosophy. He dives into dark places and expresses guttural truths. He takes the banal, the overlooked and draws out the absurdity. He depicts the ridiculous, confesses moments of shame. He doesn't simply tell jokes. His goal, it seems, is to get at truths as much as it is to make audiences laugh. And the laughs he elicits resonate deeply. I feel them in the back of my throat and down my spine.

But his comedy wasn't always so deeply engaged with real life. In an interview with CK on his podcast WTF, comedian Marc Maron describes the transition in CK's style of comedy: "You were a uniquely poetic absurdist comic...but then all of a sudden something broke in you and all of a sudden you were doing personal revelatory comedy." CK: "Yea the act I was doing was kind of meta-, it was kind of absurdist comedy, I wasn't really functioning as a stand-up. 'How ya guys doing?' I wasn't that kind of guy." And ff you watch clips on youtube of the young Louis CK performing, you can see him doing these sorts of absurdist jokes. In his opening bit in a clip from 1987 (when he was 20) he goes up to the mic and makes high-pitched squeaks which, he explains, are dolphin jokes. In a clip from '91 as he pokes fun at the way you brush your hair with your hand to signal to a salesperson that your looking for a hair brush, he makes monkey sounds. In another bit he talks about waving while not realizing he has a peach in his hand, as if he's proclaiming, "I have a peach!"

And so there are definitely instances of CK doing these kinds of absurd meta-comedy bits (even in his 1996 Comedy Half Hour special on HBO he does a series of anti-comedy impressions, including JFK as a prostitute in Saigon) but I wouldn't say, from the clips available, that he was an absurdist comic. More often you see him doing the sort of observational humor that he still does now (for instance a joke he first used in 1990 about us still using the word 'minorities' when 80%--the majority--of people in New York are minorities) but, significantly, without the vehicle of potentially embarrassing/inappropriate personal revelation.

Whereas the early Louis CK has a joke about strangers reappearing in your life, as if god ran out of extras in the movie of your life, current Louis CK might twist that joke to be about him feeling that its ok to murder strangers if no one finds out, especially if there are plenty of other strangers to replace them. In the '96 special you do see CK talk about himself (he has a bit where he talks about not wanting anything in his ass) but he does so in a way that is safe and unsurprising. Contrast that with his 1-hour HBO special Shameless in 2007 wherein at one point he talks about wanting to get blown by Ewan McGregor.

And so the early comedy of Louis CK wasn't so much absurdist as it was impersonally observational. He employed observational humor that didn't stick because he didn't delve into untouched/unspoken-about/unsafe territory and didn't achieve the kind of intimacy that comes from exposing your darkest, weirdest, non-normative, supposed-to-be-private feelings on stage.

But CK did certainly make a change and it was significant. Beginning somewhere around 2004/2005 he started engaging with material from his actual life. In his One Night Stand HBO special from 2005 he talks about his baby being his asshole, about trying to keep his masturbation hidden from his wife, about the amazing responsibility involved in having a kid--including the ability to name your kid anything, anything, there are no laws, there should be a couple laws, he says.

He made a change and it was having kids that changed him.

In the interview with Marc Maron, he gets emotional as he talks about looking at his newborn baby: "When I had my daughter--when her mother had her in front of me--everything changed, I just fell in love with this kid. I remember she was screaming in the delivery room, really upset, she seemed angry. I expected, you know, when a kid's crying in the delivery room everybody's happy and smiling--ah, look at her cry!--but I was really upset for her...[here he begins to cry, takes a few seconds to compose himself again]" Then later: "You just don't know until you see the kid's face that there's now someone who's going to be with you for the rest of your fucking life and I didn't know how that would feel. But when she came out it wasn't about my feelings, it was about--this kid is scared shitless and she's really angry about being taken out of her mom...and I put my head next to hers--and she's just screaming with a purple face--and I said 'its ok, you're going to be ok, it's alright, I'm here' and she stopped screaming on a dime, turned and looked right at me."

Louis CK really loves his daughters. Perhaps he never really loved anything or anyone before. He calls them assholes and idiots, an imposition on his life, but, as he says, they're only an imposition because he cares about them. If he didn't care he could just leave them with their mom and not give a shit. When he does jokes about his dark feelings towards his kids, he takes the audience into inappropriate/private territory that is relatable, surprising, and true. Being annoyed with your kids goes hand-in-hand with loving your kids. Parents who claim to never have ill feelings towards their kids are not telling the truth.

But how did this change in CK's life translate into a change in his comedy? His early work was absurdist/impersonally observational. Watching those early clips you do feel, at times, that you are listening to an original comedic voice, but the voice is not intimate, the material does not feel real. It seems that it took the birth of his daughters to show CK that the real world and real feelings are worth commenting on and that comedy is worth taking seriously. As he states in the interview, after he had his kid he felt that he had to really support his child, couldn't half-ass it and make excuses. And so part of the reason that CK's recent material is so good is because he now works so hard. You can see him repeat jokes all the way from '91 in his 2001 Comedy Central special but now, since 2007, he's produced an hour's worth of new material every year--just like Carlin did. He writes, directs, and edits his show 'Louie' all by himself, all while still taking care of his kids. His comedy is more "real" now, in a sense, because he lives a real life. On stage, he engages with a world that he lives in, rather than a world that he stands outside of.

So, the stand-up comedy of Louis CK and of others who perform the same type raise an interesting question: what exactly is it that we want from stand-up comedy? Obviously we want more than just jokes. We want honesty and insight and intimacy. Some comedians, some of my favorites, don't go for anything more than laughs. I don't think that makes them aesthetically inferior. But, there is a connection between comedy and truth, between comedy and philsophy. Wittgenstein, who didn't have much of a sense of humor, once said that a serious and philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes. Maybe so. But many truths are sad and terrifying. I think sometimes comedy can obscure the truth. I wonder what it'd be like to see someone on stage not trying to entertain, not trying to make people laugh or cry, who, without even acknowledging the audience, just stands there with a microphone trying to get to the truth about his life and the world. Would we like that? Or would we want to shoot ourselves in the ears?