Two returns

Happy New Year, all.

I've been on overseas holiday, hence the blog hiatus.    A holiday post will follow soon - I like writing them, as a form of (hopefully) digitally permanent on-line diary.    I guess other people might use Facebook for that, but here I get to protect privacy to some extent.   

As for another return, I have been reading about the comedian Louis CK.   

I know next to nothing about his style of work, except that I suspected  that I would not like it for the usual reasons I dislike most modern stand up comedy:   the puzzling expectation that a torrent of swearing you would not tolerate in your home (or even at a bar) is funny; the introspection that often embarrassingly discloses a troubled personality beneath the jokes.   I did see him interviewed on Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars show, and he seemed relatively normal, but I still had my doubts.

Anyhow, the first news stories about his surprise "set" at a comedy club were about him mocking the Florida school kid advocates for gun control.  I listened to the recording (via a Twitter link) and found it more about mocking young adults for being too serious about everything today:  that they don't know how to have fun like in his day when he was doing drugs, sleeping around and other stupid stuff.  That's what youth is meant to be about, you know?  What's more, they try to tell others how to speak too, with identity politics probably a bigger target than gun control advocates.

The swearing and crudity of it was beyond my (not optimistic) expectations, and I found it completely unfunny.  As many on Twitter were saying, he was sounding more like a coarse Right wing comedian (maybe an extreme version of PJ O'Rourke's old writings celebrating in a libertarian spirit his youthful stupid behaviour - and certainly unoriginal.  Many in twitter noted the similarity to a set on Youtube by some other male - I think Right wing - comedian I had never heard of with the same "kids of today - what's wrong with them, they're so annoyingly against fun" shtick.)   

But, I thought later, is it possible that Louis was not really "punching down" - as many on Twitter accused him - but mocking his own "old man" attitude?   Some said that his old act always did involve coarse attacks, but in a self aware way.   I don't know, I'm not going to research his old work to find out - but I doubt this explanation.

Today, and the primary reason for this post, is that I read a Slate article which excerpts much more from this stand up set, and it really shows that it was appalling in its entirety.  

Because I don't like repeating swearing on this blog, it's hard to cut and paste anything from the article quoting Louis, but I find the analysis completely convincing, and am utterly puzzled as to how any audience could find him funny.   Has the sudden disclosure of his weird exhibitionist behaviour towards women broken his comedy mind?   But what excuse does the audience have?

Go read the Slate article if you want to be appalled at what some people will laugh at today.

Update:   The Atlantic explains some of the nature of his old comedy act/persona, and is equally appalled at the nature of the leaked "new" Louis CK.  A key section:

Over the years, C.K.’s comedy evolved, as any comic’s will, but at their best and most well known, his jokes were about interrogating himself as a means of interrogating American culture. As C.K. shuffled uncomfortably on stages and sets, clad in rumpled T-shirts and slouchy dad jeans, he served as his own act’s useful idiot: C.K., author and character at once, played the privileged guy who—he’d be the first to admit it—didn’t fully deserve his privilege. It was classic observational humor, bending its lens to examine the warped terrain of C.K.’s own psyche, and while it was winking and postmodern and self-hating and self-elevating, it also contained an implied transaction: Hearing C.K.’s confession would offer, for his audience, its own kind of reconciliation. His performed selfishness could seem, in its twisted way, generous.

But while offense, in that sense, has always been an element of C.K.’s comedy—offense as a means of inflicting discomfort, and thus, the promise went, of illuminating awkward realities—offense, now, is all there is. The layer of alleged truth-telling is entirely missing from the new material. C.K.’s new set, according to its leaked version, doesn’t merely punch down; it stomps, pettily, to the bottom. None of it is smart or brave; it is simply cruel. And yet it tries to justify itself by suggesting that C.K. himself has been the recipient of cruelty. One of the key moments of the leaked set comes when someone, either by walking out or by shooting him a look, seems to question C.K. as he complains about being unable to use the word retarded. C.K. responds with a rant:

    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 okay. You can get mad at me. Anyway.

It’s an old story: The guy who abused others, claiming his own victimhood.