One of the perpetually fascinating aspects of popular culture is the way that something from any one of its constantly bubbling sub-genres can occasionally boil over and demand truly widespread attention. For example, ours is a time rife with talent shows, but only American Idol and, to a lesser extent, Dancing with the Stars have generated the kind of popularity that gets them routinely referenced beyond their niche. We’ve got quite a few going horror movie franchises, but only the “Saw” series really sticks in the wider public imagination. Lots of people go viral on-line, but there’s only one Justin Bieber.
Whether or not one is already paying attention to an act, meme or idea when it runs over and gets into everything, the tell tale sign that it’s reached a new category of fame is when it starts entering your brain through unexpected directions. If elderly relatives mention a movie star, non-sports fans ask about an athlete, or media outlets that don’t often cover television mention a show, you know something’s up. For whatever reason, sometimes one you agree with, sometimes one you don’t, it’s struck a chord and entered the current cultural vocabulary. Even if you don’t like whatever it is, odds are you can at least see why other people do.
Which brings us to Louie, the not-quite-sitcom, not-quite-anything-else program from comedian Louis C.K. Currently in its second season on FX, and garnering praise, press (via) and award nominations left and right, Louie follows the traditional sitcom formula of taking an established comedian and harnessing his fractured take on modern life in an ambiguously fictionalized but still zany world. C.K.’s stand up is predicated on his off color candor about the grim realities of American life once you outgrow beer commercials and bong rips. He makes jokes about getting older, he makes jokes about being a parent, and then he makes more jokes about getting older.
Now, getting older is a very rich comedy vein, particularly in a society where people in their mid-twenties are known to feel jealous of those even just a couple dozen months their junior, and C.K. does more with it than pretty much anyone else. He’s got wonderfully mean ways to describe his deteriorating body as well as an almost limitless supply of the hilariously embarrassing social situations that accompany parenthood for the modern divorcee. He then takes it further, using the sympathy he earned from his foibles to joke about broader social points that would otherwise come off as boringly political or simply dickish.
At the end of his 2008 standup special “Chewed Up”, he has a long bit comparing girls to women, in which he defines “girls” as the ebullient, carefree twenty-year-olds who are in the beer commercials and “women” as hard bitten parents like himself. In lesser hands, such material could come off as ho-hum liberal bitching about gender double standards or sexist dribble. C.K. routinely manages the neat trick of making things get a laugh that would otherwise get a groan.
To its credit, Louie leverages that appeal better than most stand-up-turned-sitcom shows. Instead of using the lead’s comedy routine as punchlines in metronomic sitcom setup/punchline dialogue, Louie simply puts its star on stage and has him perform stand up comedy. These segments are far and away the funniest parts of the show, laugh out loud more often than not.
Unfortunately, there is another part of the show that doesn’t work nearly as well and, sadly, takes up a majority of the screen time. Louie loses its edge and most of its humor when it ventures out of the comedy club to chronicle the semi-autobiographical shenanigans that feed its lead character’s comedy routines. All too often this means a kind of sketch comedy so glacially paced as to make post “Weekend Update” Saturday Night Live seem cutting and quick witted. There is a sort of Aristocrats boldness to making your audience watch you sing along to The Who for three straight minutes, but it isn’t the kind of comedy around which you can build a series.
Louie is filled with set pieces like that, drawn out scenes in which nothing particularly comedic happens for a good, long while. Sometimes these are dream sequences or awkward situations, sometimes they’re built around guest stars, and sometimes they’re about the two young girls who stand in for his real life daughters. Occasionally these scenes build to a fun absurdity, more often they plod along before finally being put out of their misery with painfully obvious twists or punchless punchlines.
To take one meandering example, freshly traumatized by seeing a homeless man killed by a garbage truck, Louie pours his heart out to a cynical date who only agreed to meet him because she thought his fame might be good for her career. As anyone who’s ever flipped past a Seinfeld rerun knew from the moment it started, she’s initially wowed before he goes too far and ruins things. The odd clever punchline or unexpected quirk aside, these scenes are rigidly formulaic and terribly dull.
Compounding the problem is the awkward juxtaposition of stage Louie (unflappable, keenly perceptive, immune to humiliation) with off-stage Louie (bumbling, easily mortified, and socially clueless). However true that may be in real life, from the vantage point of a television audience it’s difficult to reconcile the two as the same man. Nor does it help that the stand up portions appear to have been filmed in a real club in front of a live audience while the rest is standard sitcom, right down to the tasteful lighting and impossibly large New York apartments.
The good parts of Louie are so good, and the bad parts are so fucking boring, that one can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if Louis C.K. had followed in the footsteps of Dave Chappelle and used his relatively censor free* cable show to truly break the mold. Chappelle created a sketch show unlike any other sketch show by hosting it like a stand up infused talk show. C.K. took his excellent stand up and wedged it into a standard sitcom format (something that already didn’t work once) that’s slightly off kilter, but not enough to make it consistently interesting.
Louie is good enough to rise above the rest, but only rarely so. Its general acclaim beyond the usual confines of cable television says more about the weakness of the competition than it does about the show itself. You could do a lot worse than Louie, but he could’ve done a lot more, and that makes it a frustrating watch.
*The evolving standards of cable shows are their own interesting subplot at this point. Sometime recently words like “shit” and “cockmeat” became okay while “fuck” remains bleeped.
