Oh, I agree totally. I LOVE Louis CK, and I liked his SNL routine. I was merely responding to the mini-sidetrack in this thread about others who have explored that particular idea. Sorry if it came across as a criticism.
As someone else pointed out, tragicomic film is a different medium than stand-up comedy. So, it’s a bit like, say, Jethro Tull doing a jazz-rock interpretation of Bach’s “Bourrée.” Nothing but awesome.
I hate it when that happens. Just the other night I put my tongue in a film projector and it fed in really far and got burned on the bulb and I had to use a shrimp fork to pry it loose, that really hurt.
Louis CK makes me laugh out loud, but I like that sort of subdued, layered humor. For more of the typical LOL comedians, I think dropzone might give Bill Burr a shot.
I didn’t find the SNL skit particularly uncomfortable, but it was funny as hell. The most uncomfortable, dark, hilarious, and absurd send-up I’ve seen of pedophilia (or specifically, UK media hysteria over pedophelia) was Chris Morris’s Brass Eye special.
The fact that you would post to a website called “The Straight Dope” - whose members value directness/explicitness - and insist on describing a disturbing scene like that with a euphemism like “using the bathroom” - is revealing. If you can’t even bring yourself to type “…wasting away and shitting their own pants,” it’s not terribly surprising that you can’t see the humor in jokes about the absolute irrepressibility of child molesters’ urges.
As it happens, I recently watched The Judge, in which Robert Duvall’s character is undergoing chemo for terminal cancer. There is a scene where he does indeed uncontrollably shit himself; as Robert Downey Jr.'s character helps him into the shower and starts hosing him off, we see Duvall’s character chuckling at the ridiculousness of his plight.
Should we all be offended that the people involved in this production sought to find humor in the plight of a chemotherapy patient who was wasting away and shitting his own pants?
I thought it was masturbation.
Not according to my research.
The routine was at most mildly edgy. Really, by the standards of standup comedy, it was really no big deal. Tackled some hard subjects… well, really, played touch football with them.
By the standards of broadcast television, he was pushing it, but go to any semipro night at a comedy club and you’ll see 25 vastly more risky jokes on every potentially offensive topic you can imagine.
Louis CK is, IMHO, the best comic in the world right now, at least of whom I am aware, but really, guys, speaking as a comedian, on the Offense-O-Meter that was like a 4/10.
Robert163, I really do want to hear your interpretation of the construction of those jokes, if you wouldn’t mind.
“Cathartic experience” is the key. Louis CK and comedians like him are providing an important public service: Saying out loud the things that we all think despite not wanting to, and that we won’t allow ourselves to fully articulate. Those things clog up our mental machinery and cause blockage. Louis is providing us with a mental laxative.
The laughter that results is from a feeling of relief similar to the one experienced when a bad case of constipation is finally cleared out. There may be some discomfort involved, too, sure. But afterwards you feel a lot better.
That’s basically what stand-up is about, at least when it’s good: Dealing with taboo subjects in a safe setting. It’s actually very ritualized. A martian observing earthlings would probably write up an anthropological thesis on it along the lines of “ritualized taboo processing language”. I think it’s basically a form of psychotherapy.
Anyway, how someone finds the guy offensive is beyond me. When you get down to it, he’s the most PC person on the planet. He’s clearly anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and a moral voice telling us all to get over ourselves and get our shit together. He never makes fun of the victim. The only ones who really get it handed to them in his comedy are entitled white people and himself.
He’s a wise man, I think.
To be clear: that’s what I started the OP about. He seemed pretty darn comfortable but fully aware that he was looking for the edge of broadcast TV. “Last time on…” and all.
This thread has gone in interesting places.
I thought that, while not tame, it was hardly a huge deal. The ending about molestation pushed the edge, but it could have aired 15-20 years ago and my jaw would not have dropped.
It helps it was live, so he could slip it all through.
I assume their aired it unedited on the West coast?
Kinda funny, kinda meh. I like standup in general, so that sent me off on a sampling of who’s out there. Amy Schumer gave me a mild asthma attack.
I love layering and subtlety, but surprise is what will eventually kill me. I can see how CK’s monologue could have surprised people, and maybe shocked some who were too dim to figure out what he was doing and saying, but my surprise came from how much sense it made, how hard it can be to stop a pedophile because he enjoys it, or the anticipation, so much that he will risk jail time or even his life to get it.
Never said I was funny, and never said I wasn’t boring. Now off for some Dara O Briain to get more of an engineer’s take on humor.
Of course–but maybe is a bit he’s done that this reminds me of. The central humor is the idea that we all have terrible thoughts. Bringing them out into the light of day lets us laugh at them and makes us a little less miserable.
Watch his face during the routine–it’s as expressive as the words. And what he says around 2:35, when some people boos him, is kind of brilliant.
Robert, curious – just how much of the video did you watch? You said you only watched half, but when did you turn it off?
The talk about “we must not joke about something so traumatic” side topic brings to mind, for me, of gallows humor, or battlefield humor.
Soldiers who find themselves in horrific conditions quite often learn to try to deal with those conditions through humor. In other words, the very people suffering under/from incredibly violent and grim settings and events, joke about it. Should they shut up, and be silent? It’s not appropriate to joke about the irony in the phrase “friendly fire”? Or that overly bland statement that “Tracers work both ways.”?
On the point that things should be left unspoken for fear of offending someone, I was reminded of PTSD (or "shell shock, “battle fatigue”, etc.). IMO, not talking about it delayed (in the US, anyway) for a couple generations, development of the proper treatment techniques to heal the people who suffer from it. The generally mistaken assumption that “shell shock” = cowardice lingered on far too long, in part, in my view, because of the social pressure not-to-talk-about-it.
Nutshell: I don’t accept the premise that something must be ruled out-of-bounds to humor. Humor is needed for a healthy mind, IMO.
“With the fearful strain that is upon me day and night, if I did not laugh, I should die.” - Abraham Lincoln
*“If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.” **- Jimmy Buffett
“And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep.” - Lord Byron (Don Juan)
*
“Imagine Porky Pig raping Daffy Duck.” - George Carlin
and shouting “squeal like a pig!”