The applause of thousands of people thunders off the walls of the theater. The energy is at a fever pitch. Backed by elegant red curtains, the man they’re all waiting for enters. His balding red hair is the type of red hair that was never described as fiery or passionate. He’s wearing jeans and a black t-shirt that floats over his overweight torso, like a white sheet over a kid dressed as a ghost for Halloween. Once the noise dies down, he speaks.
“Thank you very much… uh… Hello everybody, uh, hello.” He pauses. “By everybody, I mean, uh, you guys. I mean everybody who’s here. Really, I shouldn’t say everybody, cause, uh, most people are not here. By a pretty huge majority.”
It continues for a few minutes, talking about how the majority of people are already dead, before he apologizes, confessing that he really doesn’t know how to start a show.
That man is the comedian Louis C.K. as he is today: 43, out of shape, recently divorced after a decade of marriage, raising two little girls and humbled in every sense of the word. He wrote for Chris Rock and for Conan’s “Tonight Show.” He watched his first show “Lucky Louie,” an unconventional traditional sitcom, flop impotently on HBO despite critical acclaim and a devoted fan base. So when networks courted him to shoot another pilot, he was Hollywood-haggard and generally jaded. In the end, he took the most modest deal with FX, but he wanted something more.
“I’ll give you a show,” C.K. said during an interview on Opie and Anthony. “But I’m not pitching it, and I’m not writing a script and sending it to you first.”
The end result was “Louie,” whose first season ran over the past summer.
As the show’s writer, director and lead actor, “Louie” is entirely C.K.’s. It’s best described as a series of films depicting moments in the life of Louie, a recently divorced stand-up comedian who’s raising two girls in New York City, watching his body decay with age and generally coming to terms with life. From there, “Louie” plumbs C.K.’s understanding of how the world works. He is very observant, very cynical, and all too self-aware to lapse into pretentiousness.
In a New York Times article, he remarked, “It
s very vignette-y, itss very vérité. All those French words. I use sem all.e
I also find C.K. harkening back to the French movement that tries to capture the ennui and isolation of living in the busy, constantly moving city. “Louie” is a vehicle to display C.K.’s obsession with capturing moments in time. Each film lingers, capturing strands of incident against the endless melancholy of day-to-day existence. Where do you go? Is there even anywhere to go?
The show is also riotously funny. Nothing is sacred, mainly because to C.K. the idea of making things sacrosanct is absurd. One of the pieces involves Louie going to a Doctor’s office to get examined by his old friend, played by Ricky Gervais. As Dr. Ben, Gervais gleefully runs amok, jokingly diagnosing Louie with AIDS from having sex with too many little boys and calling his secretary in to stand in awe of Louie’s penis, which Gervais describes as “the worst thing [he’s] ever seen and that includes watching [his] dad hang himself while he was masturbating.” The secretary, not even looking, agrees in a dull monotone before leaving the room, worn down by Dr. Ben’s shtick. There’s such humanity in her reaction to the absurd doctor. The piece works if you find humor in Dr. Ben’s vulgar physical, but what truly drives it is the amusing, almost sad way Louie puts up with him.
In one episode, Louie is pumping gas and has to go to the bathroom. He enters the seedy bathroom. There’s a circular hole in the thin, yellow wall and around it is crude sharpie marking around the hole in all caps: HEAVEN. A conservative, dignified businessman enters the bathroom and, noticing the hole, unzips his pants. Louie protests and, after deflecting the man’s polite misunderstanding of, “Oh, I’m sorry, were you going to go?” asks, “How do you know that something terrible’s not gonna happen to you? Why would you take that risk?” The man pauses for a second, then says, “I don’t know. You gotta have faith.” The rest of the episode, titled “God,” is a flashback to Louie in Catholic school, tormented by Jesus Christ’s sacrifice.
At this point, it’s probably become apparent that I love this show. It’s so stark, so dark, so funny and at times, yes, even so beautiful. Yet around episode four, I started to become disappointed. The show was too marvelous, too strange to live. I was waiting for the bomb to drop and then the news came around episode seven: “Louie” was being renewed for a second season. Between his new stand-up special titled “Hilarious” (which premiered at Sundance earlier this year and whose intro I described at the beginning of the article) and “Louie,” Louis C.K. is a man at the peak of his work ethic and creativity. I look forward to seeing what he does next and the lack of cheeky meta-self-narration and snide asides throughout the article should convey how much I’m looking forward to buying Season 1 of “Louie” on DVD. From this writer, at least, it comes highly recommended.
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