Hilarious debuts tonight
at 10PM on Comedy Central.
Louis C.K.'s latest stand-up special, Hilarious, makes its Comedy Central debut tonight at 10PM. If you have Epix, you may have seen the special when it aired in September. It also played at the Kendall Square Cinema that month. You may want to wait until Tuesday, though, when Comedy Central releases the full-length, uncensored DVD, and also the CD version.
Hilarious has been well reviewed -- you can read my thoughts here from September -- since its debut at last year's Sundance Festival. And C.K. is already working on the next special, his fourth hour since 2007's Shameless, a breakneck pace by most stand-up standards. He is also now filming for season two of Louie on FX.
Louis C.K. is ridiculously prolific. The first season of his low-fi sitcom Louie ended last night, and he’s planning season two. He’s got a new special, Hilarious, screening tonight at the Kendall. And he’s got a whole new show ready when he comes to the Wilbur later this month.
You would think that you would recognize more material from Hilarious as premises in Louie, but no, other than a couple of random subjects, it’ll pretty much all different. Consider also that last time he was in Boston, he recorded his shows for a possible CD release (although there has been no news on that front). And there was a lot of material in that set that doesn’t wind up in Hilarious.
And just about all of it hits. Hilarious is amazingly consistent with C.K.’s previous two specials, Chewed Up and Shameless. Both of those specials were solid and inventive, and Chewed Up was a classic. Hilarious fits right in.
No comic working right now has a funnier internal logic than C.K. Most of his observations, no matter how absurd, echo someplace in your brain to make you think you may have thought exactly the same thing at one point or another and not been able to express it. The hot girl at the bar? She is three lines to C.K. – boots, skirt, and shirt. A weird seductive geometry.
Guys going out just to get laid rove in packs of nine wearing the same button-down shirts, hoping to run into nine women walking in the same formation. Technical schools, to C.K., are the places where dreams are narrowed down. “You can do eight things,” he says. “We got it narrowed down to eight for you.”
He even has his own stupidity put together in a process – he does something stupid, analyzes it, and commences with the self hatred.
One bit might seem familiar to fans who watched C.K.’s appearances on Conan, and that’s his riff on people’s impatience with technology. He expressed a lot of the same thoughts on Late Night in 2008 (see video below).
If you can’t get out to the Kendall tonight, Hilarious will be on the Epix premium cable channel on September 18. After that, it will air on Comedy Central, which will also releae the DVD, next year.
If you want to see Louis C.K. this month, your options are plentiful. He’s at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre September 24-26. His new special, Hilarious, is screening at the Kendall Square Cinema at 7:30PM September 8, one showing only. It also screens in Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. that day.
The special debuts on the premiere cable channel Epix on September 18, and will then move to Comedy Central to be aired and released on DVD next year.
And there’s also one week left in the regular season of Louie on FX (search the site for my episode reviews and earlier feature on the show). The show has been picked up for a second season.
If you want to see C.K. in Boston for his Word shows, get your tickets now. He has sold out the first four shows, prompting the Wilbur to add a fifth show on Sunday, September 26. But the folks at the theater tell me there are only about 400 tickets left to that show as of this afternoon.
Stay tuned for more on Hilarious.
Complete Hilarious screening info:
Austin 7:00 PM screening at Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek, 13729 Research Blvd., Austin. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 10:00 AM and are available through www.drafthouse.com/lakecreek
Boston 7:30 PM screening at the Kendall Square Cinema, 1 Kendall Square, Boston. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 4:00 PM and are available through the Kendall Square Cinema box office or online at www.landmarktheatres.com
Chicago 7:00 PM screening at Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., Chicago. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 5:00 PM and are available through www.etix.com
Los Angeles 7:30 PM screening at The Landmark, 10850 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA. Tickets go on sale on Tuesday, August 31 at 10:00 AM and are available through http://louisck.tickets.musictoday.com/default.aspx
New York City 7:30 & 9:45 PM screenings at IFC Theater at Waverly, 323 Avenue of the Americas, New York City. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 10:00 AM and are available at the IFC Theater Box Office or through www.ifccenter.com
Philadelphia 7:30 PM screening at Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. Tickets go on sale on Wednesday, September 1 at 12:00 PM and are available at the Prince Music Theater Box Office, the Trocadero Box Office or online at www.ticketmaster.com
San Francisco 7:30 PM screening at Embarcadero Center Cinema, One Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level, San Francisco. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 10:00 AM and are available through www.landmarktheatres.com
Washington, DC 7:30 PM screening at Arlington Drafthouse, 2903 Columbia Pike Arlington, VA. Tickets go on sale on Friday, August 27 at 8:00 AM and are available through www.arlingtondrafthouse.com
Louie finally gets lucky tonight, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. He lodges a common complaint onstage, that he’s feeling old and has lost his sex drive. But then he’s approached by an attractive 26-year-old blonde who is attracted to the fact that he’s old and he’s given up. And that he smells a bit. Maybe like failure.
The concept is funny, short, and over when it needs to be. No need to drag it through the whole episode.
Second scene is Louie at a PTA meeting, something it might be hard for fans of his stand-up to imagine. The parents all argue about how the kids should be spending their time (Dancing? Sleeping?). “This place is stuck in the 70s,” says one parent. “Who still teaches math anymore?”
Louie brings up the fact that school sucks, and that’s how it’s supposed to be, to dead silence. It’s a concept apparently no one has considered, but one that bonds him to fellow single parent Pamela, played by Pamela Adlon. Louie and Pamela immediately set up a playdate for the kids, and wind up drinking wine and talking about life and parenting, often with the kids nowhere in site.
The conversation would be a real downer if Louie and Pamela weren’t both enjoying the opportunity to finally talk to another adult who wasn’t spazzing over some new age topic.
Adlon, who also played Louie’s wife on Lucky Louie, is an consulting producer of the series, and it’s obvious she and C.K. work well together. Their scenes together make you wonder what could have been if Lucky Louie had gone to a second season. Their repairing is a happy occasion.
Interspersed in all of this are short segments of Louie with his therapist, a deadpan rude and absurd David Patrick Kelly (yes, the same David Patrick Kelly who once taunted, “Warriors come out and play-ee-ay!”).
Like many of the people from whom Louie seeks advice, he is not only no help, he makes things worse. Maybe Louie is depressed because he’s fat. Has he ever thought about death and gotten an erection? No, but thanks for mentioning that you have.
There is no big moment in episode four like the poker game in episode two or the fight with Nick Di Paolo in episode three, but the playdate comes close. But really, there doesn’t need to be. The laughs are there, and having one “big moment” per episode would start to drift into formula, something episode four helps to break up a bit with a few more segments in different settings.
Looking forward to episode five, and hoping to get that to preview for you again.
When you see the episode, leave your comments below. I am enjoying the series thoroughly so far, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Nothing in Louie’s life can be easy, not even a simple doctor’s appointment. Tonight’s episode opens with Louie talking about his body, and his advice on how to have the body you want. “You just have to want a shitty body,” he says.
Louie’s doctor is played by Ricky Gervais, a master of humiliation, and he’s in fine form giving Louie a physical. Even a routine check-up can be nerve wracking, undressing in front of strangers or, worse, a guy you know who happens to be a doctor with an overdeveloped sick sense of humor. The last place you want to encounter slapstick comedy is during a rectal exam.
I’ve probably given too much away already, even for an episode preview. But I could probably describe exactly what happens and it wouldn’t dull the impact of Gervais’s performance.
This episode is again split into two parts, the second of which centers around a political argument between Louie and Nick Di Paolo. If you know both comics, you know their views are sharply opposed, but you also know they’re great friends.
You get to see both onstage, both doing politically themed comedy. Louie has a wonderful riff on the term “Indian Giver,” after which Di Paolo rips on Obama and white guilt. Sitting around after the show, the argument boils over, and a physical fight erupts. Watching two comedians fight is pitiful experience, and after an accident, they wind up in the emergency room.
Similar to episode two, this episode shows how volcanic friendships can be, with conflicts over real world subjects, and how personal bonds will trump those every time. Louie and Di Paolo wind up cracking each other up and taking aim at the people around them in the emergency waiting room.
Their walk home feels just as genuine as the poker game scene from episode two, which also starred Di Paolo. That’s because there’s real history there, and that’s what’s showing up onscreen. Louie and Di Paolo both have Boston roots, and they’ve played the same rooms for the same people, and shared their ups and downs together. You could never in a million years find that kind of chemistry through random casting.
There’s a one-two punch developing with Louie. Two segments, one that’s way over the top, awkward, and hilarious, and one that’s equally funny, but more real. You never know which one you’re going to get first. But you can always count on the funny.
When HBO canceled Lucky Louie almost four years ago, Louis C.K. thought he’d never have a better job again. He’d had near complete artistic freedom to create the show, and a good relationship with the network. He didn’t have to make the kind of sitcom he dreads, with one of the three or four basic formulas networks are still clinging to.
Lucky Louie was profane and realistic to C.K.’s own experiences, and he got to hire a bunch of friends that would never quite fit into a traditional sitcom, like Danvers native Nick Di Paolo. With staples like Friends, Everybody Love Raymond, and Frasier recently retired, there was talk that Lucky Louie might be the shot in the arm the format needed.
Ask C.K., and he’ll tell you he just wanted to do a good show, inspired by classics like All in the Family and The Honeymooners. “To me it’s like, sitcoms had been perfected to this point where they weren’t shot in front of an audience any more, they were putting this little kind of perfectly timed laughs between these kind of Harvard graduate written jokes, and it just didn’t feel like fun anymore,” he said in a conference call with media last week.
“So I wanted to go back to kind of a messy, ruckus, a more like—I’m not a good speaker,” he adds. “You know, you talk, they laugh and the next person talks. Like they’re feeling more like a performed stage show, which is what sitcoms originally were.”
There were accolades – from the Chicago Tribune which called it “subversively hilarious” and the New York Times, which called it “nifty, light, and kind.” The ratings weren’t bad, but it wasn’t enough. HBO pulled the plug and C.K. went on a stand-up binge – lucky for comedy fans – recording three specials in three years, the last of which, Hilarious, made its Sundance debut in January.
Four years later, C.K. is in a position he never thought he’d be in again.
Tonight, C.K.’s new show Louie debuts with back to back episodes at 11PM (EST). He has even more creative control than he did before, even though there may be a few more restrictions on specific words. And the show itself is infinitely better, finally capturing what makes C.K. one of the funniest stand-up comedians in the world right now.
“I remember after Lucky Louie was over that the main thought I had was, ‘I’ll never see that kind of creative freedom again.’ But this is nuts, because they literally don’t know what I’m doing. They have no idea what I’m shooting, what I’m writing.”
He’s not kidding. Where Lucky Louie was shot on a soundstage in LA, C.K. films Louie himself with his own team in New York. There are no script meetings with the network, no writer’s room, and not even an official cast. C.K. writes the show himself and shoots it around New York with his own crew, and then shows the finished product to FX.
“It feels more like an independent film the way that we run it, and it kind of comes together,” he says. “We shoot pieces without knowing what episode they’re going to belong to. The network is completely MIA. They don’t do anything until they watch the episodes when they’re finished being edited. So it’s just us making a show. So I think that’s the biggest difference. Besides that I’m doing a single camera show now instead of multi-cam.”
C.K. says he knows he’s earning that freedom on an episode by episode basis. “If I turn in two bad episodes in a row, they’ll come visit me and they’ll want to read the scripts and they’ll want to visit the set,” he says. “They have that right, contractually, but they’ve laid off so far because they’re happy with what they’re getting this way, which is that they leave me alone.”
Many will point out the similarities to Seinfeld, at least in format. Each episode shows C.K. in New York, dating or hanging out with friends, interspersed with footage of C.K. at New York City comedy clubs like the Comedy Cellar or sometimes Caroline’s.
But the similarities mostly end there. “We’re as different as night and day as far as what we talk about,” says C.K. Louie’s point of view comes from a single dad working as a comedian and trying to raise two young girls, a reality that Seinfeld’s show about nothing wouldn’t have addressed.
And there is no typical set-up and resolution in a half-hour format. Every particular idea is given its own space, and if it’s something that can be addressed in just a few minutes, then it begins and ends there.
“In the same way that stand-up gives you the freedom to choose how long you talk about something or just drop in one word about something, it’s kind of like a collage, an eclectic kind of a form. This show, I wanted it to feel like that. I wanted it to feel almost like a stand up set,” says C.K. “It’s sort of herky-jerky different, different lengths of pieces, different … on things, different reasons and tones for talking about things or showing things.”
There will be plenty of Boston-centric cameos from people like Robert Kelly, who plays C.K.’s brother. But each character will come and go a bit more naturally in the series, and there is no set cast.
“It feels like when you cast a show up front, when you do a series, you’re making a series of bets that you kind of have to stick by,” says C.K. “You hire eight people, or whatever it is in a cast, and you just have to really hope they stay compelling and interesting, and if they don’t, you still have to service all those people. That’s actually how you talk about it in the sitcom writers’ rooms, is we have to service these characters, even if we don’t like them.”
You’ll see Kelly and Di Paolo in recurring roles, but not every week. Di Paolo will be playing himself.
“I only hired Bobby to play my brother for one episode just because I felt like having him for that one episode, but he was really good and compelling and pathetic, so he’s in two more, I think,” says C.K. “Nick is in three total. Nick DiPaolo and I were roommates back when we were both struggling stand ups in the early 90s. He’s still a struggling stand up, and that’s only because he’s a miserable guy. He’s never happy in success, either. But anyway, Nick and I have a very easy rapport.”
A less recognizable Boston name is Kimberly Barlow, who plays an ex-girlfriend from home with whom Louie reconnects on Facebook. C.K. says he looked at about 300 actresses from New York, but couldn’t find anyone who felt like a Boston girl from back home.
“We actually went to Boston and had a very cheap casting session there on like VHS tape,” he says. “Kim was so authentic and so real, and I think we pretty much blew her mind by flying her to New York and giving her this huge part in the show. She stepped up, though, and she was awesome. I often get comments about her, that she seemed really real, and she was. So she was my favorite Boston rescue.”
C.K. says his freedom also extends to subject matter, a very important point to him. “I feel like there’s no story I can’t tell,” he says. “The tricky thing about my situation is that if you write a script and they flag something as, you can’t do this, you at least save time. Because they don’t see anything until it’s been shot and cut, I run the risk of shooting things that they will then not approve, because they do have a Standards and Practice department. But the woman who runs it is an extremely intelligent woman, and she’s great. I kind of know what her limits are.”
The result is a show the feels like Louis C.K., sounds like Louis C.K., and looks like Louis C.K. in all of his awkward, thoughtful, rough, and profane glory. “It’s not perfect, my show,” he says. “I think that’s the trade off. It’s not slick and perfected, but it’s really from the gut. Stand-up is like that. You say er, um, a lot, and you don’t cut it out. You get caught picking your nose on stage, but when you hit, you really hit. So I’m hoping that’s what the show is able to do.”
Louis C.K. has finally found a television vehicle that reflects who he is a stand-up comedian in Louie. It is at times profane, uncomfortable, thoughtful, and hilarious. There are laughs of all kinds. There are little smiles when he tells his kids everyone is having French toast despite the fact that their mother doesn’t make them eat it. There’s nervous laughter when he tries to kiss a first date at the door on the way out. And the biggest laughs when the show finds Louie onstage doing stand-up
The show focuses on C.K. as a stand-up comedian trying to raise two young daughters in New York City, a scenario straight out of his personal life. “That’s the only thing I’m comfortable with in life anymore,” he says onstage during the opening stand-up bit. “I know how to raise a couple of kids.”
There are two parts to the pilot episode – a field trip to the botanical garden that never actually happens, and an extremely awkward date – both framed by footage of Louie onstage at the Comedy Cellar, one of C.K.’s haunts in New York City.
“I volunteer not because I’m a good person, but because you have to,” says Louie about his kids’ public school. “Because nobody works there.”
Cut to the bus ride. The driver doesn’t know how to get to the gardens or what to do when the bus breaks down when he literally hits an underpass. Louie is legitimately shocked by the lack of diligence, and equally unsure of himself when he’s thrust into a leadership role to fix it.
“Hey man, what do you have to do to be a bus driver? Nothing? How can you be so god damn irresponsible when you’re transporting peoples’ children?”
The outrage is real, and justified, but it’s not coming from some high-handed lecture or morality play. Louie is afraid because they’ve broken down in Harlem, and his immediate solution is horribly inappropriate, relieving him of the high moral ground. That makes the point that much more effectively.
The second segment – the show doesn’t weave all of its plot points into a nice little sitcom basket – shows Louie going on one of the most awkward dates ever committed to film. He does everything wrong from the start, dressing up too much, not planning a romantic evening, and smiling uncontrollably when his date looks at him. None of it is really his fault – he just can’t help himself.
This is one of the best points about the show. In a traditional sitcom, Louie would wind up at home in front of the TV or talking about the date with friends. Here, the woman is taken away by the most literal and absurd form of deus ex machina you’re likely ever to see on television. Then we see what the real Louis C.K. would have done after a date like that – write some sharp, original stand-up comedy about it.
There is a sensibility to the pilot unlike anything else on television (see Louis C.K. finds a perfect fit at FX for his thoughts on this). Before he broke into TV, and before it was an easy and popular thing to do, C.K. was making short films. The pilot has that same roving feel as a stand-up set. It can go anywhere, alternate between gritty reality and flat out odd, and begin and end whenever the subject demands it.
This is clearly a better show than Lucky Louie, C.K.’s attempt at twisting the traditional sitcom format on HBO, and it deserves a much longer look than the single season C.K. got from that. Lucky Louie is dead, long live the real Louie.
If you weren’t already convinced that Louie was going to be a fascinating watch, this should be the clincher. The cold opening is a bunch of guys sitting around a table playing poker. Stop there, this could be scene from any one of a thousand sitcoms over the last half century.
But then you see who’s at the table – Louie, Jim Norton, Eddie Brill, Nick Di Paolo, Hannibal Buress, and Rick Crom. This isn’t your usual cast of sitcom characters, and they’re talking like they would if you walked in on them at the Comedy Cellar. They are busting each other’s chops, insulting each other’s mothers in vulgar and inventive ways.
Then the conversation turns to the one gay comic at the table, Rick Crom It starts as a free for all about gay sex, punchlines flying, and Di Paolo protesting he doesn’t want to hear the specifics. But then it turns into a poignant discussion about the word faggot, and the associations it conjures for gay men.
At one point, the room gets quiet, and Crom talks about the medieval connotations of gay men being burned, but not on a stake, which would be too good for them. They were thrown into the kindling below instead to burn. There’s a long and troubling history associated with the word, and, Crom reveals, for some gay men, the word brings that up every time.
Again, C.K. avoids trying to take the high moral ground. Everything devolves into jokes again quickly, with everyone participating. And Crom leaning over to smooch Di Paolo’s head. The end result isn’t a judgment, it’s a bunch of guys bringing up a serious topic, showing their differences, and getting along. If only people behaved like that more often in real life.
And that’s all before the opening credits, which aren’t really opening credits, because they happen nearly eight minutes into the show. Nothing is taken for granted in this show. Everything falls where it feels right.
The second half of the show deals with life after divorce, set up by Louie onstage riffing on the topic. That’s followed by a short montage about the day of the divorce, with Robert Kelly playing Louie’s brother. Kelly gets some great mileage out of hammering the negative into Louie, telling him he’ll die alone under a thin blanker, actually asking him to picture it. (Kelly was only supposed to be in one episode, but C.K. says he’ll be back).
The laughter continues over the closing credits back at the poker table, and you can tell its genuine for everyone in the scene, just as Louie is genuine all around.
Louis C.K.'s new show, Louie, premieres on FX on June 29, and the network has released a couple of new promos for the show. I've seen the rough pilot, and this show is much more in tune with C.K.'s outlook and captures his humor much better than did his HBO show Lucky Louie, as Jon Stewart notes below on C.K.'s Daily Show appearance.
Video promos taken down as per agreement with FX.
Louie, A New FX Original Comedy, Premieres Tuesday, June 29 at 11PM ET/PT only on FX. These videos will be removed from the site on July 9, as per agreement with FX.
For good measure, C.K.'s hilarious appearance on The Daily Show last night:
Louis C.K.'s new sitcom, Louie, will no longer debut April 1, as announced earlier this month. FX now plans to debut the show sometime in June, with Denis Leary's Rescue Me serving as its lead-in, creating a block of shows created by Boston comedians.
From the FX press release:
“Louie is a brilliantly funny and original series, and we are excited by the critical response to the show,” said John Landgraf, President and General Manager, FX Networks. “Even though it is a drama, Rescue Me has always been regarded as one of the funniest shows on television and it will provide an outstanding, compatible lead-in for Louie. We successfully used Rescue Me as a lead-in for the majority of the first season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. We believe in Louie and want to provide it with the best possible platform for success.”
Note: The videos from previous posts on Louie will be taken down by the end of the week at the request of FX, and hopefully replaced soon.
Louis C.K.'s new FX sitcom, Louie, doesn't debut until April 1, but FX is generating an early buzz with new clips, like the one I posted last week. It's hard to tell from these clips what the actual show will look like once we get to see it 22 minutes at a time (this one's only 20 seconds), but my guess is that this show will hit even closer to home than Lucky Louie.
C.K. won't be able to get away with quite as much in terms of language and nudity, but FX has been loose enough with shows like Nip/Tuck and Rescue Me to imply C.K. will have more than enough freedom with which to tell the stories he wants to tell.
Louis C.K. announced his new sitcom, Louie, with a hilariously off-color video on LouisCK.net in November. Here we have our first look at the show, which debuts April 1 at 10PM on FX. If Lucky Louie was an autobiographical show about marriage and kids, Louie looks to be equally autobiographical, this time about a single dad trying to raise two kids.
Here's the clip (note: I can only keep this on the site until April 8, when I will have to take it down at the request of the network).
In other Louis C.K. news, his new stand-up special, Hilarious, get a warm reception at the Sundance Festival last month, the first stand-up special to debut there. Here's a report from Ain't It Cool News, plus bonus clips.
If you missed Louis C.K.'sshow at the Orphem in March, you get a second chance to see him tonight at the Hanover Theatre in Worcester tonight. It's a great venue -- I saw Lily Tomlin there last year. And C.K.'s new material is as strong as anything he's done for his last couple of specials. And since C.K. already taped his third special last month, he may be starting over and working on even more new material. Either way, he is always worth seeing.
Also, it seems C.K. caught up-and-coming Boston comic Joe Wong's set on Letterman last month, and he was impressed. He wrote this in his blog, about the thrill of seeing an unknown comic kill on a national show, his thoughts on the perfect TV spot, and a shout out to the Comedy Studio.
I went to the Comedy Studio the night Wong's set aired to watch it on the second floor with a group of comics and Studio owner Rick Jenkins. I can honestly say that in ten years of covering the Boston scene, I'd never seen anything like it. Jenkins made the announcement that one of Boston's own was about to appear on Letterman, and the place went silent (except for a non-comic or two in the far corners) when Joe took the stage. Comics cheered every punchline, and if everybody hadn't been standing already, Wong would have gotten a standing ovation. It felt like a real victory for everyone in Boston comedy, and I'm glad to see C.K. talk about it. I'm glad it felt that way outside of Boston, too.
Steven Wright has just announced a new show at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre May 29. Tickets go on sale Friday.
And if you want to see Wright before then, here are a few clips of his recent guest spots on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. He's been popping in unannounced lately, for a few hilarious bits.
Here's the cold opening from March 31, when he did the cold opening instead of Ferguson:
Here's the panel segment from that same show:
Then on April 2, he showed up again for another cold opening, this time with Brittany Murphy:
Also, Louis C.K. will be taping his next one-hour special in Milwaukee at the Pabst Theater April 18. C.K., who recently taped a marathon show at the Orpheum here in Boston for a possible CD release, will tape two shows at the Pabst, at 8PM and 10:30PM, from which he will cull his next one-hour special, his third in three years.
My friend Sean McCarthy at The Comic's Comic was at the Louis C.K. show Saturday, and wrote this review. C.K. was readying a set for his new specials, which he is tentatively set to tape sometime in April. If Saturda's Orpheum gig is any indication, his biggest problem will be choosing what material makes the final hour. Most every riff was right on, from his take on our impatience with technology (expanded from his Conan appearance that made the rounds on YouTube) to having to choose between walking the dog and keeping an eye on your kids as a single dad (sorry, pooch). He did an hour and thirty-five minutes for the main set, and then an encore that he kept short, mentioning that people really ought to go home.
Also, The Bostonist wasn't terribly impressed with last week's showdown between Bill Maher and Ann Coulter. I spoke with Maher about Coulter in 2007, before he taped "The Decider" at the Berklee Performance Center. He said he hadn't spoken with Coulter in a long while, and said, "I always got along with her well, because we never talk politics."
Louis C.K.'s last one-hour special, Chewed Up, was brilliant and often brutal, bringing to life in perfect detail C.K.'s innermost thoughts on his own family, his own body, and even murderous fantasies about the deer near his home. The Newton native has a tough task ahead of him trying to follow that up, but that's what he'll be doing at the Orpheum Theatre tomorrow at 10PM. C.K. is looking to follow George Carlin's pace of turning in a new one-hour special every one and a half years or so, and he is already well on his way with his first two specials, Shameless and Chewed Up. C.K. may tape the Boston show for an album, and he's looking to tape video for the new special sometime in April. When I spoke with him this week, we had a good, sometimes rambling conversation about the specials, his new material, and his special plans for the Boston show.
I’ve heard you’re now planning not to tape in Boston?
Yeah. It’s a real drag but it didn’t work out. I’ve been trying to get this special together and it’s been taking a little longer than I thought, so I have to wait until April to shoot it.
Just to get the material down?
No, no. The material is ready. It’s the logistics of shooting a special. It’s a lot of cameras, and I had to bring the financing and everything together but it just didn’t happen fast enough for me to hire a crew to do it in Boston.
Did you learn a lot from doing most of the work last time?
Definitely. We figured it would come together a little quicker. But this is the way this kind of thing goes. The show I shot in Boston last year, by the way, was intended to be shot earlier. I was originally going to shoot it in, like, January and I had it up as ready to go in January, and then we kept moving it. We moved it like three times. This time I couldn’t move it, the Orpheum’s a lot bigger, I couldn’t really move the venue around. Originally, I was going to shoot last year’s special at the Sanders Theatre, on the Harvard campus, in January. But we couldn’t pull it together, so we had to pull out of there, and then we found the Berklee was a nice replacement. But in this case, the Orpheum is the Orpheum.
And to me, doing the show at the Orpheum, that’s a very big event for me. So I’m sort of taking that as its own thing. I sort of think, I actually think honestly the audience will have a better time. I’ll be able to do as much time as I want and just be totally unhinged. Which is how I would generally do the special, but nobody’s going to be bothered by camera people, nobody’s going to be asked to move around their seats or anything, and there’s no cameras in the way anywhere. So in a sense, it will be a better show for those people. I’m going to make up for it by doing as much time as I’m capable of.
The last thing I saw taped there was Comics Come Home, and there was a 45-minute wait while they fixed a camera, and fist fights broke out in the lobby.
Yeah. The Orpheum is going to be interesting. [laughs] We’ll see.
There’s a certain decadence to that room. People complain about seats and things, but I kind of like it a bit worn out.
Right, I know what you mean. You mean the Orpheum itself. That’s why I’m taping there, because I love it. It’s a beautiful room. It’s just so historic and it’s so Boston. I love grand buildings that were created for people. You know, regular folks. I think that’s a great thing, to get as lofty as possible about a theater, the thing I love about America – we build great, giant, beautiful things, and they were never meant for, like, royalty, you know? When you go to Versailles, you’re like, they made this all for some fat pig who they eventually cut the head off of. But when you go to Grand Central Station or a place like New York, this was made for the people, you know. This was made so that some guy with a bar hat could watch a movie with his feet up on the marble and chew peanuts and throw it on the rich people below. I just love it. And that’s the feeling you get in the Orpheum. So I just really love that place.
You know, I picked the Orpheum to do this year before I decided to shoot a special there. Looking through the venues and saying, let’s go back to Boston. To go back to the Orpheum – and it’s pretty sold out, it’s going to be full – that should be a pretty great night.
Do you think that you’ll try to go back to tape there? Where will you shoot the special now?
I’m going to start taping in April. I can’t do a big show at the Orpheum and then go back in a few weeks, you know what I mean. There ain’t that many twenty-six hundred people who are going to come and see me again in two months. So I’m probably going to tape in either Milwaukee or Cleveland.
Are you getting into a good rhythm for developing an hour a year now? Is that something that’s gotten easier?
Well, it’s not easier, but I know how to do it. You know what I mean? The difference is, is something easier, meaning something that you are good at and know how to do. It’s a lot of work and actually this one is harder than the other ones I’ve done, because the other ones inspired me to try doing things that are hard. [laughs] But it’s a lot of fucking work. This one’s a lot more energy, and it’s longer, too. I’m doing, like, ninety minute, two hour shows. There’s a lot more energy in them.
What are the harder things that you’re attempting?
I’m more animated, I’m louder and there’s more going on in some of these bits. And it’s a longer show, and it’s just more intense, I think, than some of the other ones that I’ve done. So yeah, that’s a lot. And it’s definitely really hard but it’s also important enough to me now that it’s all that I really do, these shows, these hours. It’s something I dedicate all of my time to.
Will you edit it yourself again?
Oh yeah. This one I’m going to do it all myself again. I just really like to have control over that stuff.
Was that a rewarding process last time?
Oh, I love it. You know, I was a filmmaker and I really got a lot out of cutting it together. Yeah, that was really fun. I think I did a good job. I’m happy with the way it came out. If it was shit I would have hired somebody better than me.
I thought the last special was great. We spoke about this just before it came out – the non overblown look to it, I’m a comedian riding in on a Harley with dancing girls and fireworks.
Right. By the way, I am going to record the Orpheum show professionally, audio-wise. I’ve already decided. I’m going to record it and use it possibly as an album or something. I’m not sure yet, but I want it. I just know it’s going to be a great show, and it’s probably going to be close to two hours. It’s going to be late, it’s fucking ten o’clock. We were originally going to sell a second show before it, an eight o’clock show, if we decided to shoot for the special we were going to do two shows. So it’s a ten PM show, which is pretty late for comedy, but I’m going to do a shitload of time and record it, because I have a feeling that’s going to be a very unique show. And I’m going to want it.
Would you release an album that’s different from the video of the special?
That’s something I’ve thought about doing, because I think with the last special, it was kind of, there was a little bit of a drag with the recording. I read a review of the CD of Chewed Up that I thought had an accurate criticism, which is that the whole first part of the CD is just quiet with the crowd mumbling, and then I come out and they’re cheering – they left that on the CD. That’s retarded. [laughs] Who wants to listen to that? There wasn’t any care taken into putting it – and that’s my fault because I shepherded that whole thing and if I had made it stink, I could have edited the CD too. But I just got tired. I just had to move on to other shit. That’s my fault. But to me, the idea is that I would release the same material but a different performance of it as a CD. I think that would be more value. No two shows were alike. They’re similar and use the same material.
I’m sort of talking out of my ass right now. I don’t know that I’ll do that, what I’m saying. I don’t that I’ll use it. But I’d like to try.
I think comedy geeks like myself would wind up comparing the bits from one to the other, seeing how it changed.
Yeah. I think so. And it’s funny, because Carlin is, to me, is still the pace car of… prolificness. Proliferteriouslesness?
That’s going to be hard to spell.
What’s the noun that is related to the word prolific?
I think it’s prolificness, but I’d have to go back and take a look.
Prolifpolery or something like that?
You could say “productive.”
[Mumbles looking through online dictionary]
I’ve got my trusty real world dictionary here…
Prolificalness. Here’s the one I thought it was. Prolificity. Prolificness works. Prolificalness, and then prolificity is what I would like to use. I’m going to go with prolificity, and George Carlin being the pace car of prolificity, had a lot of specials that were collections of shit that had been on albums. He did a bunch of albums, and his first great specials just caught up with his albums. They were the same material. I don’t think you can do that now. I think it’s different now, because everybody sees everything. You know. Things, oh boy, here we go, proliferate through the market more. So it’s hard to do that. You might be able to, maybe. Anyways, having a special and an album that reflect each other has become very common now – I didn’t mean to say any of this, what I said before.
Louis C.K. on Conan:
Have you kept the Conan bit in the act? I know in a Vanity Fair interview you said you were worried it would become over-exposed.
No, it’s still in because it’s a good forty minutes of the set. It’s a much bigger bit. That was literally ten percent of it, was on Conan. So I think it’s fine. In the past, my whole thing of redoing the act every and having every special be fresh, I’ve always done some of the material on the talk shows to promote it. It makes sense to use the strong stuff on a talk show, when you’re trying to use the talk show to promote it.
For this special, do you think you’re doing more topical or news-related material than you’ve done in the past?
No. That whole bit on the economy is certainly informed by what’s going on, but no. I just don’t do that. It has a shelf life, and… I don’t care about current events. They’re hit so hard by comedians. That whole thing of, “Hey, what the hell…” you know, “And the eight babies lady…” You know, Jesus. And fucking enough. It’s the most boring part of our national conversation, is the five headlines. You can’t tell the news from Entertainment Tonight anymore. It’s just a bummer. And I think it’s one of the most boring aspects of stand-up, and it’s just me being really harsh, is just the feeding on that shit. And taking the, “Here’s my take on it.” Oh, okay, that’s about three degrees different from what Conan said, and Leno said, and Letterman said, and Jon Stewart, and Dennis Miller, and Spike Feresten, and Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon. And the columnist, and the Onion. And a bunch of bloggers. And the legions of comedians around the country. Your take on the Octomom, you somehow found a little territory in there that was just yours. And I really wish you had thought about something about yourself instead.
The only thing that you can bring to the world that’s unique is yourself. That’s the only thing you have. I’m being an asshole, because there are people who observe culture and are really great at it… Bill Maher, there’s another one. So many people hitting everything. They all do it well. I have one bit in this set that right now that’s about Captain Sully because it relates to the airplane stuff, and to the whole everybody’s miserable thing. But it’s a tangent of that.
I think when I did the first half-hour I did for HBO, I opened with stuff about the Mel Gibson Jesus movie, and it’s my biggest regret, ever. Because who the fuck cares about that now? I watch that now and I was shocked when I saw it. It’s like, really? I opened with that? That’s crazy. Nobody gives a shit about that now. And I just saw “the Jesus movie.” What Jesus movie? The Greatest Story Ever Told? Which one?
You’ve done a lot of intensely personal stuff, do you talk about the divorce in the act? And if that’s too personal to ask—
I don’t talk about what happened in my divorce or what happened in my marriage, I talk about what it’s like to be divorced as a general thing. That’s something new to me, and it hasn’t happened to everybody. And the way that people react to divorce and stuff like that.
Louis C.K. on deer:
This is probably a bad segue, but I wanted to talk about the deer joke from Chewed Up. I think that’s one of the most awful images that I’ve ever laughed at out loud – laughing at “bleedy dicks” and AIDS-ridden deer. How do you craft something like that to lift it from being just gratuitous or outrageous into something that’s truly funny?
I think it’s the spirit in which you say something. If I just said, “Hey, what if there was a bleedy dick AIDS guy fucking a deer? How about that folks? Come on, what are you all… Don’t get all… Fuck you.” That would be one thing. But the anger I have toward that deer is the engine I have for all of this stuff.
Chris Rock said something interesting in his last special about, once you’re angry at somebody, all bets are off. Call them what you want. Calling somebody something in anger is different from just saying, that’s what I think those people are. You know what I mean? Like, saying all gay people are faggots or all black people are niggers is just coldhearted racism. Like murder one, two, and three. If you murder somebody in anger, you actually get less time, which is bizarre. It’s the same sort of thing if you say, “Look at that nigger walking down the street.” That’s not okay. But Chris describes the whole thing where a black guy takes your wallet and does all this shit to you and pisses on you or whatever, and then you go, “Fucking nigger.”
He tells the story about being in traffic listening to like, I forget who it was, Wham or some gay music. He just happens to like certain music that’s very gay. And he says if he’s in a red light and it turns green and he won’t move and he’s just listening to his music really loud, the guy behind him has the right to yell, “Hey faggot, get out of the way.”
So I think, given the context, this poor deer who never hurt anybody.. Definitely the point of that bit is, to me, the complete out-of-proportion anger that I’m launching toward the deer. And it was the hardest bit to do on that special. Because when I started doing that bit I was spending a lot of time upstate and I really was infested with deer and I hated them. But by the time I got it to the Berklee, I was fakin’ it. I just wasn’t feeling that anger. It was hard to do, and I actually took big breaks from doing the bit leading up to that show. Because I needed to really keep it fresh, and I needed to not really hate it. So that was a little tough to pull that off. I just had to just tell myself, there was a time you were really this angry at deer, remember that.
Earlier this week, we announced that Louic C.K. will be coming back to Boston to play the Orpheum Theatre on March 14. Today, C.K. announced on LouisCK.net that he will most likely be filming that show, which means it could be his next special. "I am 99% certain that we are filming this performance," he said. "I cannot add the other 1% because it isn't entirely official yet."
Louis C.K. has just announced a new Boston show. His new "Louis C.K.: Hilarious" tour comes to the Orhpeum Theatre March 14 at 10PM. Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10AM at LiveNation.com or by phone at 877-598-8689 and the Orpheum Theatre Box Office. The tour features all-new material.
C.K. is a Newton native who recorded his last special, Chewed Up, at the Berklee Performance Center last year. It's now available on CD and DVD.
Any comic could mine a topic like “boxers versus briefs” for some easy, observational material. For Louis C.K., “boxers versus briefs” is a confession. It’s a chance for him to merrily reveal how his crotch “looks like a pig’s ass when I’m naked.” Which is not the worst of C.K.’s confessions from his brutally funny new special, Chewed Up, which is out on DVD and CD tomorrow.
Here’s a sample from that routine, “My Horrible Body.”
The Newton native does not ease into uncomfortable subjects. The minute he hits the stage of the Berklee Performance Center, C.K. starts into a favorite topic of one of his idols, George Carlin, taking on three specific terms in “Offensive Words.” Here’s a clip from the bit, in which C.K. explains his hatred for “The ‘N’ Word.”
There is an undeniable logic to even the most potentially offensive of C.K.’s thoughts that short circuits the immediate shock and leaves you saying, “Huh, that makes sense.” He looks at everything with a sort of dark wonderment, whether it’s the beautiful nonsense that his kids (and all kids) constantly spout (“A Three-Year-Old’s Secret”), his diet (“My Horrible Body”), or race (“I Enjoy Being White”).
When he goes to his doctor for a sore ankle, the 40-year-old C.K. is told there is no remedy, just painful stretching he’ll have to do from now on – “That’s just a new thing you do until you and your shitty ankle both die.” He sums up the history of race relations in a tidy hypothetical – as a white person, he could get into a time machine and go anywhere and know it would be all right.
As he notes in the bonus interview on the DVD, C.K. took a minimalist approach to the setting and lights, which has the effect of focusing attention on his comedy. (If that seems strangely obvious to you, compare Chewed Up to Bill Maher’s last special, The Decider, which was broadcast live and taped in the same venue. That was meant to seem more like an event, an approach C.K. purposefully eschewed).
Chewed Up is stand-up comedy stripped down to its bare essentials, something we can expect to see from Louis C.K. about once a year. C.K. (and also notably, Bill Burr) has committed to leaving his old material behind after every special and starting work on the new one immediately following, in the tradition of George Carlin (to whom this special is dedicated). The more C.K., the better.
BONUS: The DVD is of special interest to Boston comedy nerds. Besides the aforementioned facts that C.K. is from Newton and the special was taped at Berklee, C.K. speaks at length in the bonus interview about his time here, remembering Chance Langton’s open mic at Stitches, seeking inspiration from WBCN’s Friday Funnies, and playing Off the Wall Cinema.
If you want to see Louis C.K. this month, your options are plentiful. He’s at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre September 24-26. His new special, Hilarious, is screening at the Kendall Square Cinema at 7:30PM September 8, one showing only. It also screens in Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. that day. 
Louie Episode Four
Louie Episode Three
When HBO canceled Lucky Louie almost four years ago, Louis C.K. thought he’d never have a better job again. He’d had near complete artistic freedom to create the show, and a good relationship with the network. He didn’t have to make the kind of sitcom he dreads, with one of the three or four basic formulas networks are still clinging to. 
“It feels more like an independent film the way that we run it, and it kind of comes together,” he says. “We shoot pieces without knowing what episode they’re going to belong to. The network is completely MIA. They don’t do anything until they watch the episodes when they’re finished being edited. So it’s just us making a show. So I think that’s the biggest difference. Besides that I’m doing a single camera show now instead of multi-cam.”
But the similarities mostly end there. “We’re as different as night and day as far as what we talk about,” says C.K. Louie’s point of view comes from a single dad working as a comedian and trying to raise two young girls, a reality that Seinfeld’s show about nothing wouldn’t have addressed. 
Louis C.K.'s last one-hour special, Chewed Up, was brilliant and often brutal, bringing to life in perfect detail C.K.'s innermost thoughts on his own family, his own body, and even murderous fantasies about the deer near his home. The Newton native has a tough task ahead of him trying to follow that up, but that's what he'll be doing at the Orpheum Theatre tomorrow at 10PM. C.K. is looking to follow George Carlin's pace of turning in a new one-hour special every one and a half years or so, and he is already well on his way with his first two specials, Shameless and Chewed Up. C.K. may tape the Boston show for an album, and he's looking to tape video for the new special sometime in April. When I spoke with him this week, we had a good, sometimes rambling conversation about the specials, his new material, and his special plans for the Boston show. 
Louis C.K. has just announced a new Boston show. His new "Louis C.K.: Hilarious" tour comes to the Orhpeum Theatre March 14 at 10PM. Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10AM at LiveNation.com or by phone at 877-598-8689 and the Orpheum Theatre Box Office. The tour features all-new material.
