In 2017, five women accused comedian Louis C.K. of sexual harassment. They accused him of masturbating in front of them in a professional context. The stand-up comedian admitted it in a statement and expressed his remorse for the events. From that moment on, the distributor of his new film canceled the premiere of the film and Stephen Colbert canceled the invitation to interview him on his show. HBO removed his stand-up specials and the magnificent sitcomLucky Louie from its catalog.
After a period of silence, the comedian has been releasing his creations drop by drop through his personal website with the sole promotion of the newsletters he sent by email to subscribers. Louis C.K. has always been characterized by confessional monologues where he explains his miseries. He is the main victim of devastating stories, full of anecdotes about a pathetic existence. He has great technique in connecting themes, seeks the audience's discomfort by exposing his intimacy, and can be terribly crude and biting when analyzing the human condition.
In recent years, he has premiered the stand-up special Ridiculous! in theaters in the United States and Europe, trying not to make too much noise, seeking only the most unconditional viewers attentive to his schedule. He was in Barcelona last February. Now, Netflix has lifted its ban and has just released his show, recorded at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, in its catalog.
A Ridiculous!, the comedian makes no reference or insinuation to this sordid episode of his life. It would be too much if he capitalized on it, but if he did, it would fit within the accumulation of pathetic experiences he narrates. “Today I got tested for AIDS. I haven’t had sex in years, but I needed to hear good news,” he begins. The monologue is not easy to watch because the impact of his behavior weighs too heavily. An involuntary suspense is created, a kind of inevitable countdown, waiting for the moment when the comedian will confront, with the sarcasm and cruelty that characterizes him, this dark stage to flog himself. The moment does not arrive, but thinking about it is unavoidable. And he doesn’t make it easy either. It’s almost impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, if you’ll excuse the redundancy. It’s hard to separate the monologue from the masturbator. And even more so when he talks about supposed dreams where he pees on a baby, discusses vaginas with the passion of a sommelier, and theorizes about the sexual abuse of children and pederasts. He flirts with incest by talking about his parents, goes into detail about his explosive diarrhea, his body’s sweat, and his anal irritations. He is so desperate to prove that the accusations have not made him lower his standards that it is difficult to forget the harassing pig who compulsively masturbated in front of his comedy colleagues. And no matter how much fiction and imagination he adds, the show becomes unsettling. The second part of the monologue may recover its wit, but it is so crude and vulgar that it becomes really complicated to connect with the comedian. Now you just see a slobbish guy.
