"Ridiculous," the newest show of his prolific post-cancellation career, represents a break from the past along with continuity.
In the first of his three performances at the Beacon Theater last week, Louis C.K. returned to a subject that has been on his mind the last few years: The downside of longevity.
"You can live a great life," he said. "But you're still alive after that part."
This is the third hour in a row in which Louis C.K., who is performing in Brooklyn through Saturday, has discussed the perils of living too long. He has argued it can make you out of touch and even joked that, over 100, it's time to die. ("Get out. No one knows you!") His latest foray is a quieter, meditative take on aging, expanding on an unsettlingly funny portrait of caring for his father.
"We put him in a home," he says, referring to himself and his sisters, pausing on the way to the punchline, "because he was too old to stop us from putting him in there."
Louis C.K., 58, is not making a comeback. He's been here. In the seven years since he admitted to sexual misconduct, the comedian has produced four different hours of comedy. It's a large, underexamined, formally audacious body of work that represents a break from the past but also continuity.
YOU PERIODICALLY HEAR THE IDEA that Louis C.K. has responded to being canceled by becoming more conservative or defiant. His first special back, "Sincerely" (2020), had a defensive quality that invites this reading. The title of his more assured follow-up the next year, "Sorry," made some people believe he was making light of his 2017 apology, which expressed regret but didn't use the word in the title.
But a rewatch of all his specials, from his breakthrough, "Shameless" in 2007, to the current "Ridiculous" tour, which was filmed at the Beacon, it's clear that the comedy of Louis C.K. has changed far less than the discourse around it. It can be hard to disentangle the work from the man, but that has long been the case with him.
What's faded in the memory is that Louis C.K. was once treated like a secular saint. The word genius was frequently thrown around. Critics bent over backward to interpret his sick jokes as the work of a progressive philosopher king. This was always a stretch. Louis C.K. has been far more committed to exploring discomfiting thoughts and forbidden territory than advocating any position. He still is.
He now packs arenas and has started to make television appearances and sit down for interviews with mainstream publications. He has talked at length on podcasts, none more revealing than his recent conversation with Theo Von in which he admitted that he had spent years trying to avoid the fact that he hurt people. He said he was in a program for sex and love addiction.
There were a few 12-step vibes in his new hour at the Beacon. "Life teaches you how you should have lived it," goes one premise. His subject matter here is the heavy stuff of late middle age: The ugly side of caring for dying parents, grappling with an empty nest and loneliness. The tone of his dating material has shifted from intensely perverse to gently blasé.
The anxiety and fluster that powered so much of his work has been replaced by a disarming equanimity. While he evokes the darkest subjects -- pedophilia, AIDS, torture -- the biggest twist might be that he rarely approaches any with anger.
There is a certain kind of morally slippery joke that Louis C.K. once specialized in that depended on your thinking he was a good guy. He has largely dispensed with that. His bit about how men are the biggest threat to women does not age well. He is also no longer trading in authenticity, dispensing with the signature introductions of his specials that find him walking to the show through dank hallways, alone backstage, a man at work. In all of his recent specials, he begins onstage, keeping the rest of his life out of frame.
What has most diminished is Louis CK as social commenter. His new hour is almost aggressively anti-topical. What has replaced it is a bit surprising. CK is now fixated on faith, mentioning religion in every special post cancellation, even breaking out a Bible in one bit. It might seem like an odd shift since he remains a committed nonbeliever. "If you don't believe in a god, you better hope there isn't one," he says in one special reflecting on the afterlife. "You better get on your knees and pray: Please God don't be."
The first thing that distinguished Louis C.K. from other raunchy club comics was a playful surrealist streak, and this is the kind of paradox that he is drawn to. His funniest jokes follow logic for a long distance, then land in nonsense or obscenity. Maybe my favorite joke of this late era (besides his skewering of "Good Will Hunting") is about how people now use 9/11 as a measuring stick for a tragic event, describing the death toll in, say, Sudan in increments of 3,000, saying they are a certain quantity of 9/11s.
It's a perceptive observation about the metrics we use to measure the morality of horrible events, a premise that he takes to the most absurd conclusion. "9/11 wasn't that bad," he said. "It was just one."
YOU GET THE SENSE that Louis C.K. leans toward weighty subjects not for philosophical reasons but because they provide a great juxtaposition to silly topics. He's a formalist first, one who understands that life includes comedy and tragedy in equal measure. While his standup swivels between light and dark, his debut novel, "Ingram," commits to the darkness.
It's a gloomy story of an unlucky but innocent child who leaves home with no money, resources or knowledge. The narrator's description of the most ordinary of objects can sound like Phil Hartman's Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. Taking place in a fictional old-world Americana that suddenly turns out to be a vaguely mapped dystopia, the novel brings to mind the comic's barroom-based series, "Horace and Pete."
Whereas that show aimed for the poetic tragedy of Eugene O'Neill, "Ingram" apes the literary landscape of Mark Twain. Louis C.K. has an admirable fascination with American language and the golden age of other art forms. Like his standup, his prose involves a plain-spoken poetic voice that makes unexpected pivots. It could develop into a literary voice. But as with "Horace," the ambition outmatches the craft. Witnessing this gifted comedian write dutifully humorless fiction is like watching pro athletes compete with half their limbs or, for that matter, Don DeLillo doing standup.
Louis C.K. has been honing his comedic craft for four decades. And he is the most influential standup of this century for a reason. He had one of the greatest runs in the art form, putting out seven specials before 2017 with 15 to 20 unimpeachably great bits that have stuck in the collective imagination. I still hear people cite his jokes about entitlement ("Everything's amazing and nobody is happy"), overeating ("The meal isn't over when I'm full. It's over when I hate myself") or parenting (too many to list). I stopped using the word "hilarious" for a while because of a hilarious C.K. joke about hyperbole.
It was a wonderful career. But he's still alive.
His new work is less virtuosic, with fewer elite bits but plenty of very good ones, in a dizzying array of styles. They're the product of a clear and catholic love of the form, one that he has probably been able to focus on more as offers from Hollywood dried up. There are sturdy lowbrow jokes about the difference between farts and sneezes; elaborately described worst-case scenarios; silly physical humor; soft observational lines. He has long avoided puns but sneaks one in here.
He moves from high to lowbrow with ease, remixing tropes; indulging his experimental instincts to breathe life into the oldest gags in the book. Airplane jokes. Therapist jokes. The bit that got the biggest laugh at the Beacon had no punchlines; leaning on a cheesy call-and-response standup cliché that he turned into meta-comedy. He set it up by telling the audience he wanted to do something traditional—with a lot of zingers.
"I'm so old," he said. Then he goosed the crowd to chant in unison: "How old are you?" Eyes lit up, Louis C.K. responded: "I'm so old that my mother is dead." Then he stopped abruptly.
The audience seemed a little confused, then started to laugh, as he shifted to a more vulnerable emotional register. "My sisters depend on me more now," he added casually, before changing his tone and wistfully reflecting, "Mom was really the center."
What began at the Borscht Belt shifted into a Kenneth Lonergan drama. And that was only the start of the joke. It could easily have bombed. It killed partly because of the surprise that came from setting up an expectation, then subverting it. But it's also in the way he sold the bit, precisely playing the notes of the music of traditional comedy.
There was something about the melancholy here that made me laugh longer. Without the release of a punchline, the tension just sat there until he pushed and pushed and it burst open. Life is filled with comedy and tragedy, and they don't always exist apart. That makes this joke both absurd and true. Here Louis C.K. showed us the upside of living a long time. It meant that he could not only develop his craft but also the confidence of taking a risk and pulling it off.