Shameless by and with Louis CK

Shameless by and with Louis CK

The amusing comedian has been ostracized, following allegations – actually, since he confirmed the wrongdoing, they are not allegations anymore – of misconduct, harassing women and abusing his position.

Therefore there are two ways to listen to or watch his shows – if and when they are broadcast – one being to enjoy them without considering the man inside the comic, the other option being to look for signs, elements that forewarned people and could have anticipated, maybe prevented some of the acts he committed.

Paul Johnson is a very talented writer, author of The Intellectuals, in which he looks at the lives of consecrated, worshipped geniuses that seem to have done much worse than CK in their lifetime – granted, in époques when the standards were very different, if not the opposite of todays.

Without comparing the artist with Leo Tolstoy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henrik Ibsen, Ernest Hemingway and others, it must be stated that the contemporary performer has not abandoned his children at the door of an orphanage, knowing that they would most likely die, as Rousseau did.

Some of the moments of this act are very funny, like the mention of the wait in front of an occupied toilet, where a stranger comes and shouts: “come on, shit and get out…what are you waiting for there?!” after which the man leaves the scene, leaving the helpless actor to face the potential storm of abuse.

Other lines may come across as embarrassing, perhaps explaining in part the outré thought mechanism of the hero who likes to cross lines – in other performance, reviewed here – realini.blogspot.ro – Louis CK states that he likes to outrage his public, takes pleasure in even talking about fucking a dead kid, just to see them annoyed…besides, that would be a corpse and not able to feel anything, he adds in his defense or more likely, to add to the fury.

The artist does not want to try duck vagina, which is on offer in the Chinese market, for fear that he might like it too much…

Joking is all right, no matter what the subject, some people say, giving the example of Charlie Hebdo and the gruesome, horrible murder of the journalists working there, just because Muslim fanatics did not like the humor, which they considered insulti9ng and blasphemous…

Only, psychologists, psychoanalysis might be able to read some hidden or very plain message in a jest that goes like this: “rape is wrong, condemnable, unless of course, the person you want to have sex with does not agree, in which case…what other option you have?”

Having light talk on this repelling subject, treating it with mirthful relaxation, considering it appropriate if only to provoke, laugh on the matter may encourage an attitude which may have led to the abuses committed by the man who took such a distance from the acts, perhaps thinking he is still joking when he did wrong.

The scene with the shirt is in a different register and the humor associated with it is innocent, for the comedian has an inscription on his chest that says -Awesome possum, and he meets another man who has the same shirt, goes to talk with him and states that this is a wonderful shirt, only to be rebuked and realize that he is not wearing the inscribed shirt as he had thought he did.

The performer has a friend who keeps messaging even if he has very little to say, it becomes boring to learn he is in the bar, the street, shoe store and the joke CK tells him when he is about to fly that he “hopes the plane crashes”, which sounds extreme, but because laughing matter when he ends the tale by saying he would not regret if the airplane is destroyed, since he would have learned about his demonic powers.

On the issue of Hitler, he would go back in time to rape Hitler, which would have been enough for the monster to become plagued by low self-esteem and abandon all his catastrophic acts and the mass murder of innocent victims and there is another take on sex later in the program, with Ewan McGregor as subject, the only man that Louis CK would gladly have sex with, for he has fantasies with the younger actor.

It can be hard to distinguish between realities, or just fragments of it that are inserted in the show, as mirthful segments of life that can entertain and inventions, fictions that are proposed as real, but they are there just to make people laugh and add spice with the impression that they come from the world as it is.

A monument should be built for the saddest sex act in history, we learn, which involved the artist and his spouse, who saw that her partner may commit some serious act if he has no intercourse soon – men just want to have a release of tension, while for the women is completely different, the comedian explains- and decides to try and do something about it asking if he wants a “hand job”.

They are in the daughter’s room – since the information is that he pays the rent and he can do whatever he likes, shit on the bed for instance- because the wife is very careful when he is finished, wants to put his penis in his belly button, if feasible, to avoid anything getting anywhere in the room.

It is a terrible experience, the actor says and he has the intuition that if the hand would be moisturized, wet, it would all be so much better – or not the apocalypse it is – and so he asks the spouse “could you wet your hand”, which he misunderstands as “you look like your mom”, with unhappy consequences.

Louis CK cuts somebody off in traffic and this results in an invitation for him to “suck a bag of dicks” which makes him reflect, philosophize on the issue, analyzing what this implies, if it would be a question of colors,, then moving to the realization that most people blow others, women, gay men, others forced by circumstances…the result being that there might be just about one thousand who never thought about.

If we condemn the man and his appalling behavior, we could still find minutes when we can laugh aloud at the Shameless Louis CK.