The Truth Smarts

“I’m single. Not really single, just alone.” –Louis C.K.

Truer words have never been spoken. That shouldn’t be surprising. Since 2010, over the course of 2.5 seasons, Louis C.K. has molded the most honest thing on television. In a medium filled with laugh tracks and Jim Parsons’ Emmys, Louis C.K. truly is alone.

If you don’t know “The Louie Deal” by now, I’ll boil it down for you. FX gives Louis C.K. a bunch of money. He writes, casts, shoots, stars in, directs and edits 13 30-minute episodes of Louie and gives them back to the network. They are then aired weekly each summer. Until this year, nearly all of the work was done by the star himself…on a MacBook.

It’s the most unique deal in television (maybe in history) and results in a show that is almost entirely one man’s vision. More so than Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. More so than Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men. More so than Tyler Perry’s Stuff That Black People Laugh At (that’s a show right?). So it’s a good thing that man is a bona fide comedic genius.

For more than two decades Louis has traveled the country performing a brand of comedy that can only be described as “his own.” He may have the most aptly named HBO specials in history because his act is equal parts Shameless and Hilarious, even though he would despise me using the latter word.

His television deal alone is enough to make him a comedy icon and legend for years to come, but instead of stopping there, he went ahead and made a choice that is literally revolutionizing the stand-up industry. Last December, Louis released his fourth full-length special, Live at the Beacon Theater, and made it available exclusively on his website.

Consumers willing to make a $5 digital payment directly to Louis himself were able to download the special straight to their computers, no middle men involved. He politely asked his fans not to download the special illegally. When all was said and done, he had made over $1.1 million, more than quadrupling production costs, and more than 220,000 people had received the special for an extremely low price. Since then, Jim Gaffigan and Aziz Ansari have released specials the same way, with great success.

“’I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. You live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. And even the inside of your own mind is endless. It goes on forever inwardly. Do you understand? Being the fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to be bored.”

That quote comes from a scene in Season 2 where Louie and his two daughters are taking a car ride to see Louie’s great aunt. It’s one of many times over the past three years that have made me wonder if Louis simply records every interaction he has with his real daughters and re-shoots the interesting ones word-for-word with the two brilliant actresses Hadley Delany and Ursula Parker.

These moments make it seem as if you’re watching a sweeter yet strangely more twisted version of Big Brother. There are too many of them to list, and I don’t know how true to reality any of them actually are, but the fact that Louis is able to make them feel so genuine is a testament to his directing skills.

One of these instances will always stick out in my mind. In the Season 2 episode “Oh Louie/Tickets,” Louie is forced into asking mega-comedian Dane Cook to cop him some Lady Gaga tickets for his oldest daughter. For years there has been a real-life tension, perpetuated more by fans than by the comedians themselves, that Cook stole parts of Louis’ act. The episode’s candid interaction between the two is so mesmerizing, so real, and yet nothing is resolved. Each funnyman says his piece, Cook agrees to get the tickets and they move on.

The scene is so convincing that even after scouring the internet I still have no definitive idea of what parts were real and what lines were simply amazing writing.

“It doesn’t have any effect on your life. Why the fuck do you care? People try to talk about it like it’s a social issue. ‘How am I supposed to explain to my child that two men are getting married?’ I don’t know. It’s your shitty kid. You fuckin’ tell em. Why is that anyone else’s problem? Two guys are in love but they can’t get married because you don’t want to talk to your ugly child for fuckin’ five minutes?”

Maybe you believe in gay marriage, maybe you don’t. Regardless, you have to admit that no matter how simplistic and profanity-laced that statement is, there’s a valid point in there.

That’s the beauty of Louis' greatest jokes. They really aren’t even jokes. He simplifies some of the most controversial topics that exist today and forces the audience to inspect themselves in regard to those issues. The divine humor lies in the fact that these issues, which thousands of people spend thousands of hours lobbying for or against, can be summed up so damn easily. In the above joke, he expresses practically all that needs to be expressed by the pro-gay marriage camp in less than 90 words.

Analyze those nine sentences. There is no set-up, no punchline, yet I’m sure it incites a roar of laughter every time he tells it.

There are different methods of attack any comedian can use to make his audience laugh. Along with the more traditional humor, Louis is a master at using uneasiness, guilt and embarrassment with ourselves as a society. I’m sure a majority of his audience members let those feelings leave their brain as fast as they arrived and continue on with their lives, but when I hear Louis tell jokes they resonate for days (and hopefully influence my entire life). I don’t think I’m the only one.

“That’s what optimistic means, you know? It means stupid. An optimist is somebody who goes, ‘Hey, maybe something nice will happen.’ Why the fuck would anything nice ever happen?”

On its surface, Louie is defeatist. Louie continually reaffirms his stance that nothing good is ever going to happen to him or anyone else. Anything beautiful that does happen (the subway platform violinist from Season 2, Parker Posey’s rooftop speech from the most recent episode, etc.) quickly dissipates when the world rears its ugly head.

But doesn’t that make the show all the more optimistic? Louie doing his absolute damnedest to raise two young girls the right way no matter how shitty the world is around them? Maybe there’s a better word for that than optimistic, but that’s what it seems like to me. No matter what he claims, there’s always that glimmer of hope that he’s doing one thing correctly.

And ultimately I think Louis C.K. is optimistic. What else could possibly cause a man to trust his fans enough to pour a quarter of a million dollars into a project that could have been widely pirated and resulted in epic failure? What could convince a man to tolerate failure of the worst kind on his first television show (HBO’s Lucky Louie) and encourage him to plod on until he earned himself the right to make something he truly believes in?

“I have a lot of beliefs…and I live by none of them. That’s just the way I am. They’re just my beliefs. I just like BELIEVING them. I like that part.”

Louis would be the first one to tell you that he doesn’t actually do anything. He writes dirty jokes and gets paid obscene amounts of money to read them. But that’s not true is it? I’m not sure if it’s modesty or just a specific lack of awareness, but claiming that his work is unimportant is the one dishonest thing I’ve ever seen him do.

All comedians do a great service just by making people laugh. Louis goes a step further, also making his audience think critically about the world around them. But there is a very fine line between being observational and being preachy. Even the greats, such as George Carlin, had moments when their politics overpowered their act.

It never goes that far with Louis C.K, because above all things he knows not to take himself too seriously, something that very few of us ever learn.

“You don’t have to be smart to laugh at farts, but you have to be stupid not to.”