Let's get in one extra shot against free speech in 2018.
Let's have one more example of Internet bullying and rage and scapegoating.
It was a familiar target: Louis C.K., a comedian known for being an obnoxious truth-teller, a wiseguy, and a master baiter of anything and anyone, including himself.
Following in the footsteps of Lenny Bruce, Sam Kinison, and even Mort Sahl (you recall his catch-phrase from 50 years ago, "Is there any group I haven't offended?") Louis C.K. -- JOKED.
OOOOOOOOOH.
Bob Dylan, in his song defending Lenny Bruce, noted that Lenny "Never robbed any churches, nor cut of any babies heads..."
Some people act like Louis C.K. did that.
The worst this guy did, from a legal point of view, was jerk off in front of some women who didn't turn and walk away.
He admitted what he did:
“These stories are true. At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my (penis) without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your (penis) isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly.”
Well, yes. When your career involves being obscenely rich because you're irresponsibly un-PC, you slip up. Sarah Silverman watched him jerk off and thought it was amusing, so you do have to pick your audience. Then again, your audience has the power to walk out and never pay to see you again. Or turn the dial and watch something else. Like, oh, Ricky Gervais and Bill Maher, whose tasteless and mean jokes are legend.
Louis C.K., if you're from out of town, was one of those guys witch-hunted into obscurity. It was a #MeToo trend of the times. Al Franken was forced to resign from the Senate. Various actors were fired from their TV shows and movies. This guy was fired off shows he was writing for or producing, and no comedy club would book him.
Norm MacDonald got into hot water for actually saying that Louis C.K. suffered a trauma, along with Roseanne Barr. Imagine crashing and burning; you now have ZERO income except from royalties, you're hated by millions, and considered either a pervert or insane. Isn't that SLIGHTLY awful? The women who saw C.K.'s dick were not quite as traumatized were they? The woman Barr stupidly insulted didn't jump in front of a train, did she? Norm tried to make the point...and ended up having to apologize, looking dazed and waxy on "The View" where, to their credit, the ladies on the panel offered him some understanding and forgiveness.
Meanwhile, the Twitterverse roared at Louis C.K., with the familiar cries of "Hope you never work again" and "You are scum" and on and on.
All the moral people...and none of them questioning the morality of somebody secretly taping the audio of the comedian's act and posting it to YouTube (for their monetization). It was pulled and somebody posted it again. And the jokes (or observations, really) were quoted all over the place. This, on a comedian working out his material and not yet pulling what didn't get a laugh or choosing which ones to censor if he should get another cable special.
No, on paper, what Louis C.K. said is not hilarious. But neither are the things Don Rickles said. Don even admitted when he saw them in print he sometimes winced...especially if the article was complaining about his sick, mean, counter-productive, hostile, nasty insult "humor." Awww. No question, Louis C.K. doesn't remotely have the comical voice and face of a Don Rickles, but his audience knows he's just a provocateur.
Sometimes a comedian is the opposite of the image (Don Rickles was a nice guy, Joan Rivers was a nice lady) but sometimes what you see is pretty much what you get (Jackie Mason, Mort Sahl, Rodney Dangerfield).
It's possible that a problem with Louis C.K. is that he's not only pretty creepy in his stand-up character, but perhaps is just as obnoxious off-stage. Sometimes a dislike of the person (Ricky Gervais and Bill Maher aren't exactly endearing either) also influences the response to the comedy.
Sam Kinison seemed to be more likable because he was fat, balding, and people could feel superior to somebody who was screaming all the time about his failures with women. But would Sam get away with a "homosexual necrophilia" joke these days? One told DELIBERATELY just to think up something awful to say?
How about Eddie Murphy smiling and telling the world that Asian men have "little rice dicks?" Would that still go over because Eddie Murphy has charm and Louis C.K. does not?
Louis C.K. covered the Asian penis problem, and it did not go well:
Being a good actor is important in stand-up. The audience must believe that you're making it up on the spot, or they must "buy" your personality so that a rough line is acceptable. C.K., now dealing with backlash from his creepy behavior toward women, can only get away with deliberately obnoxious comedy bits for his circle of paying fans. Those hearing about some lines he uses to them, and which might never make it to a cable comedy special, have drawn righteous indignation, and worse.
An irony is that another target during his ruminations involved the word "retard," and how it USED to be an OK word and now it isn't. The irony is that when Norm MacDonald tried to defend Louis C.K., he mentioned that one would have to have "Down Syndrome" not to understand the problem. Norm said he caught himself before saying "retarded," and went for the more PC term. Er, no. He had to apologize for THAT, too.
Louis C.K. has not done what America loves most: grovel. They love a good public apology. Knock the star down, and watch him get to his knees, apologize, and beg for the great un-washed to let him amuse them. SQUIRM.
When did Jay Leno become #1 in the ratings? When Hugh Grant was booked, and Leno cried out, "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?"
America watched Hugh Grant squirm. Yes, Mr. Handsome, caught with a prostitute too ugly to fuck for free.
This guy said on stage, when some line presumably got silence or a few boos: “What are you going to do, take away my birthday? My life is over. I don’t give a shit."
His apology was not accepted because he didn't do it to Jimmy Fallon on the new "Tonight Show." He simply stated what what he did was, now, upon reflection and losing so much money and work, objectionable.
Is he going to apologize for his remarks about any "fags" or "retards?" Not likely.
Slate, online, declared that even given past precedents, such as George Carlin, Louis C.K. went...all together now...TOO FAR.
The shock comic was shocking. How shocking.
You want Jerry Seinfeld, go get Jerry Seinfeld. He precisely knows every line down to where the comma should be. You want somebody dangerous who is not being booked on TV anymore...well, most everyone admits that the most "horrific" thing about the man's set, was that "people were laughing!"
Get their names. Get the facial recognition infra-red cameras in every comedy club.
A few decades ago, "mental retardation" was a phrase, and children afflicted, were called "retarded."
In our PC age, the words have changed. George Carlin did a bit in which he gave new and fancy PC terms for puking and other graphic words.
What's next, by the way? Ban Three Stooges movies?
Moe used to call his stooges "imbecile," "idiot" and "moron." These are all clinical terms used, at least at one time, by psychiatrists and doctors to describe various forms of...what's the phrase...intellectual challenge. The words were, along with "retard," quickly used by people as insults.
PS oh PC brigade, is "stupid" ok, too? Or does it denote some poor moron who can't help but act stupid?
Maybe the only word to use is "ignorant," but that implies people who may not have been allowed to get an education because of their race or their financial situation. What the fuck word DO you use to yell at somebody who cut you off in traffic, dropped a melon on your foot at the supermarket, or left the gas on and blew up the house? "Neglectful." My, my. "You NEGLECTFUL PERSON!"
No doubt, anyone with a connection to Parkland, or anyone with a Down Syndrome relative, would probably be offended or chilled by the comedian's remarks. No doubt, a lot of ordinary people (not necessarily "snowflakes") wouldn't be laughing either, because everyone has a different limit on what's funny or tasteless. That's the risk comedians take. If they like to be edgy, the work the percentages. They take the risk that somebody will be waiting in the alley. Jackie Mason got beaten up for doing Sinatra jokes.
But is it a stretch to think that Henny Youngman would be called a misogynist and booted off the stage today? "Take my wife...PLEASE!" No, Henny.
He "makes fun of the survivors," does he? He jokes about the tragedy, does he? Not quite. As a "realist," he was questioning why the Parkland survivors were being heard more than anyone else. The answer, unless you're Ted Nugent, is because they suffered a trauma and wanted to offer their first hand testimony. Might as well question why various women were allowed impact statements in the Bill Cosby trial. It was done to vividly show a woman's anguish over alleged abuse.
But we're talking about some asshole on stage talking in front of a predominantly drunken bunch of other assholes. We're taking a few minutes out of a 48 minute set.
Some people are allowing that Louis was funny, ONCE, but now he's just angry and bitter. Oh, like Lenny Bruce, roaming the stage with his law books, and trying to make sense out of how he'd been dragged off to jail, threatened with never working again?
Judd Apatow (the guy who said he never found Bill Cosby funny in the first place), was ready to TWEET for attention:
“This hacky, unfunny, shallow routine is just a symptom of how people are afraid to feel empathy. It’s much easier to laugh at our most vulnerable than to look at their pain directly & show them love and concern. Louis CK is all fear and bitterness now. He can’t look inward.”
CK's job is not to show love and concern. That's not why he's on stage. But the Tweet is coming from Apatow, a writer whom few really want to see performing stand-up.
Also coming down on C.K. was sidekick Andy Richter, with a little reverse racist spin to his blubbering:
“You know what’s the worst, most boring kind of comedy? The kind where older white men are angry that older white men can’t do or say whatever the fuck they want anymore.”
Andy, remember when George Carlin couldn't say FUCK? When a radio station got into trouble for playing his "words you can't say" bit? FUCK! Maybe he should've stopped being an older white man and gone into accounting or banking, and left comedy to wholesome performers. In which case Conan O'Brien wouldn't be able to say SHIT on cable TV every other night. Conan would just have to stand there doing his "string dance" routine over and over and over.
Like that "white men can't do or say whatever the fuck they want" line? I guess Andy figures it's ok for black comedians. Maybe the Wayans Brothers will do another movie where they dress up in white drag. Maybe the old Redd Foxx album should get a Pulitzer...the one where he says the ugliest thing in the world is "an ugly white woman." Maybe Conan O'Brien should be kicked off the air and replaced with a young female comedian "of color." I'd favor the latter, if it means we've heard the end of a sanctimonious kick-while-he's-down guy like Richter.
Some 60 years ago, Time Magazine profiled the new "sick" comedians, centering on Lenny Bruce and Mort "A Woman's Place is in the Stove" Sahl, but also pointing a finger at Shelley Berman. The magazine said he had a face "like a hastily sculpted meatball," alluding to Berman's acne pocks. That wasn't a mean and tasteless thing to do? But they were going after Berman, who in one of his phone routines, played the part of a drunk with a hangover, who didn't remember that "the night before" he threw a party host's cat through a plate glass window. AND the host's mother.
Berman noted on stage not long after, that he got letters from cat loves, "but not one from anyone who loves his mother."
Berman's phone competitor, Bob Newhart, once did a routine about a man trying to coax a jumper off a ledge...with a lot of bad-taste suicide jokes. He also joked about a man trying to give phone instructions on defusing a bomb: "if that thing goes off, it's ME they're gonna want to talk to, not YOU."
Bad taste humor, sick jokes, ghoulish fantasies...they abound in Ambrose Bierce, Chas Addams cartoons, Mark Twain, Rabelais, etc. etc. Some say it's "healthy" and a release to tell offensive jokes. Some say it only reinforces cruelty and a lack of sensitivity and compassion.
I was on Joey Adams' radio show when I was promoting my comedy food poem book "Let Peas Be With You." Joey, an abrasive comic who had a bit of Groucho Marx tossed into his bit of desultory Alan King, spent most of the interview insulting me. In a nice way, of course. He questioned why I even wrote the book because, he said, "in comedy, you have to devastate something. You're devastating food?"
No, my food poems, probably influenced by Edward Lear and Spike Milligan among others, may have had some irony and satire to them, but the intent was just to be silly in most cases.
The question is, do we ONLY want silly comedy? Nonsense humor?
Groucho Marx, known at the time (and forever) for insult humor, recorded a children's record called "The Funniest Song in the World." It was about a monkey who made fun of a bear and a giraffe ("laugh laugh laugh at the gangling giraffe, he's such a funny sight to see! Half half half of the neck of a giraffe is just twice as much as it should be!") The bear was upset. The giraffe was upset. Ultimately the monkey took their advice: "make fun of your own kind." So he sang about a "chatterbox monkey." Only another monkey was offended. The "wise" monkey said that no song is funny if it makes fun of somebody. So the monkey sang a nonsense song ("iggle iggle sniggle sniggle latch latch patch...") and proclaimed it the funniest song in the world.
Not everybody wants that kind of humor. Rodney Dangerfield made fun of himself, mostly, but he told a joke about an ugly guy who married a very ugly woman: "they had two very ugly kids. How ugly? In their family album, they only keep the negatives!"
Think an ugly person in the audience laughed at that? Comedians often notice that ONE person in the audience who ISN'T laughing. They wonder what they did wrong. I was once in the audience for a Dame Edna Everage show, and she (Barry Humphries) was mocking an audience member who didn't seem to be responding to the funny faces. You guessed it. The man was blind.
Another classic cringeworthy moment I witnessed: David Letterman went into the audience to goof around with people at random. A guy stood up. Dave asked his occupation. "I'm a butcher," the man said. Letterman wise-cracked, "Do you have all your fingers?" And the man held up a hand to show that, no, he lost one to his trade. Fortunately he was smiling, even more so as Dave haplessly called out, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"
A funny thing about comedians. They can often be super-sensitive. They can be the opposite of what you think. I remember Andrew "Dice" Clay seeming to fade into the woodwork after a comedy set...the exact opposite of the bragging Fonz character he had just played. Gilbert Gottfried's voice on stage is soft. As for Mort Sahl, I recall accompanying him to a radio gig where he filled in for Bob Grant on Grant's ABC call-in show. Grant was a conservative host who fueled crackpots on the phone, hanging up on some, and ranting along with others. For several hours, Mort listened to various loners and loonies ranting about their favorite topics and hoping to get an amen. I walked Mort back to his hotel, and along the way he said, "You know, Ron, your city is very hostile!"
The irony of that remark still makes me smile. Of course comedians can be sensitive when they take it, and not when they dish it out.
The bottom line with guys like Louis C.K. or Ricky Gervais or Paul Mooney or Lisa Lampanelli or Kathy Griffin or any number of others you could name, is that you should know ahead of time NOT to watch them. If you're in some unfortunate situation where you can't get up and leave, or turn the dial, your silence or scowl is enough.
Once again, let's remember this: we are NOT talking about a Showtime or Netflix or HBO special. We're talking about a work-out performance in a small club where a comedian is being egged on by his most hardcore of audiences, the ones who really want him to "let loose" and be logical/offensive. We don't know how much of this set would ever have gotten past even C.K.'s self-censorship.
I recall seeing Louis C.K. hosting "Saturday Night Live" not that long before the jerking-off-in-front-of-women scandal broke. Some of his opening remarks were good for a shock laugh, and some weren't. Some were definitely tasteless and unapologetically so. There was no question about what is attitude was. As Mort Sahl once said on stage, "I'm just a boat rocker. That's all I do." Louis was thinking up ways to shake people up, and stand out by saying what others might not. Kinison did that a generation ago, working the clubs. An admiring Rodney Dangerfield decided to book him for an HBO comedy special, saying, "You did it the hard way."
The public chooses who plays the big room, who plays the small room, and who doesn't get booked at all.
Dangerous people who provoke and encourage racism, misanthropy, misogyny and other forms of hostility usually lose their sponsors, get banned from social media, and face protests at speaking engagements. These people are of the Alex Jones type. They aren't professional comedians. The comedian is only trying to get some laughs and maybe make people think and see a new side to things at the same time. To equate Louis C.K. with an Alex Jones is a very dangerous, and disturbing thing. It's not funny.
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