I've finally been able to pinpoint what exactly it is that seems excessive in the praise heaped on Louie. A sample of the praise:
I think Adam is right that C.K. can get away with things that, as Conor puts it, Rush Limbaugh would be pilloried for because people trust him and feel like they have a clear sense of his worldview. And that, of course, because of all the work C.K. put in before he had a critically raved-about television show to build up his credibility as a white guy who is sensitive and intelligent about race in a way that lets him say somewhat raw things.Except, as best I understand it, C.K. himself has denied this is a valid approach to take towards comedy. Somewhere in my archives unaccessible to search at the moment I discuss a scene in the TV special Talking Funny where Louis C.K. and Ricky Gervais get into an argument about whether a particular dumb joke is funny or not, and if it's funny, why it is. Gervais takes the position that bad jokes are only funny, and can only reflect well on the comedian telling them, if we know that the comedian has built in an ironic appreciation of the joke itself. He gives as an alternate example David Letterman, who is respected even though he tells essentially nothing but bad jokes because he's created a persona in which bad jokes are celebrated for their badness. Letterman gets a pass because he's aware. C.K. takes the opposite position: a joke is funny if it's funny, and it doesn't matter why it's funny, or even if the comic telling the joke has any particular awareness of its humor. The intention of the comic doesn't matter, and probably doesn't even register, if it's knowable at all. Given that, it seems odd to credit C.K. with master intentions behind his work when that doesn't seem to jibe with his reflective view on comedy.
But if all that's true--commentators are reading a level of seriousness into C.K.'s work that is unknowable and quite possibly orthogonal to what he's attempting to do--then it raises a more interesting possibility: the whole critical exercise is a way for otherwise conscientious folks to enjoy the thrill of the transgressive while allowing themselves an intellectual veneer of respectability. And if one wants some evidence for that theory, and for the idea that C.K.'s work is more scattershot than critics will admit, one needs to look no further than the scenes from Louie that are usually omitted from discussions of the show. People will talk about the scene with the suicidal comic, or where Louie confesses his love, or the irony of the racist great aunt as though these are all planned and transcendent moments, while ignoring the homeless guy who gets his head knocked off by a truck, or the abducted-and-replaced homeless guy, or the weirdness on the subway platform* as--irrelevancies? Either way, have to respect a man who gets people to talk up the brilliance of his best work while getting them to ignore all the work he does that they don't like.
*Someone--Sepinwall, maybe?--pointed out C.K. really seems to have it in for homeless people this year.
4 comments:
"the whole critical exercise is a way for otherwise conscientious folks to enjoy the thrill of the transgressive while allowing themselves an intellectual veneer of respectability."
Isn't this also the case with "Mad Men" - that fans get some kind of enjoyment out of returning to a time when, as Archie Bunker put it, "goils were goils and men were men"?
That's certainly true of season 1 of Mad Men, where the plots are shameless about enjoying the spectacle of something that the show is formally disapproving of (e.g. Nixon v. Kennedy). It's definitely not true by season 4, where it seems to me like the sexual politics are genuinely complicated and that complication is in the text of the show itself, not in the juxtaposition of what-those-people-did and our-reaction-now.
Huh. I've never even seen Mad Men, just read/heard (too?) much about it, and about how it's apparently this cultural moment all about nostalgia for a time when it was OK to smoke cigarettes, ogle curvy women, and not care where your kids get into preschool. That it's supposed to be a mix of 'look how far we've come', 'heh, remember that!', and 'hey, wasn't that actually a better time?' I mean, Banana Republic now has a whole Mad Men-inspired clothing line. Whatever the content/evolution of the show, that may be much of its legacy.
Most of the criticisms of season 1 and season 2, which I think is most of the general criticism of the show (in NYRB, Slate, and other places) is valid and correct on the points you're making: some of the attraction to the show initially seems to have been the idea of pretty, well-dressed people behaving in ways that can be vicariously enjoyed even while subject to disapprobation. It's also true that it's not really what the show's about anymore, which is relatively easy to tell from the recaps that have difficulty with that fact that Don Draper's alcohol consumption is now a clearly bad thing, etc: the fun is being taken away.
There are also a couple of relevant differences between the shows for the larger point I was making, which I deleted from my previous comment because they seemed off-point but will make now anyway. The first is that Louie seems like a prime target to talk about whether or not he "means it" because C.K. is the only writer on the show--so it seems fair to apply his aesthetic criteria of humor to his own work. In contrast Matt Weiner obviously cares a lot about what he's doing and whether his intention comes across, and has always the presence of other strong TV writers in the room. The other big difference is that Mad Men has always had two perspective characters, Don and Peggy, whereas Louie only has Louie. I think that's a big part of the reason C.K. gets the credit he does--as writer, producer, and star, what he does is assumed to be "really" him in a way it just can't be in a larger TV show.
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