Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sincerely Louis CK’ On LouisCK.com, Sorry Not Sorry In First Special Since #MeToo Admission

We knew this was coming. Louis CK, ostracized largely by society in the wake of his #MeToo admission in the fall of 2017, already had begun touring as a stand-up once more not more than a year later, and filmed his performances in Washington D.C., on March 7-8, the final weekend that any live shows happened before coronavirus quarantines began taking effect, closing comedy venues nationwide. Just four weeks later, he has edited the footage down to an hour and released Sincerely Louis C.K. on his own website, charging $7.99 ($8.70 after taxes, for NY customers)…

SINCERELY LOUIS C.K.: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: From 2008-2017, Louis CK rose to become the biggest comedian in show business, revolutionizing the industry by selling specials and concert tickets for himself and others on his website, reinvigorating TV comedies by comedians as auteurs through his FX series, Louie, which hauled in two Emmy Awards for writing, prompting many stand-up comedians to ask for their own “Louie deal.” The comedian also won three other Emmys for writing for his stand-up specials.

A November 2017 expose by The New York Times, quoting five women accusing him of sexual misconduct, for which he’d quickly confess, took him down. A film he’d made and premiered at that year’s Toronto Film Festival got shelved, and he had to buy it back. His manager and agent dropped him. FX and Amazon Prime dropped his executive producing credit from the series he’d developed for them (Baskets, Better Things, One Mississippi). He lost the ability to tour for a year. HBO, Netflix and Showtime removed his previously released specials from their platforms.

Fast forward to today. You can find three of his specials back on Netflix, while his HBO works projects (including his 2006 sitcom, Lucky Louie) are on Amazon Prime, and five of his specials stream for free on his site, louisck.com.

But you’ll have to pay up if you want to stream his brand-new hour of stand-up, Sincerely Louis CK.

He announced the offering, charging $7.99, via email on April 4, 2020. He alludes to the global pandemic without mentioning it explicitly in his email (and doesn’t touch it in his special, which he managed to record in the final possible weekend he could have before quarantines went into effect). Even if he does manage to jokingly suggest couples in bad marriages should self-quarantine. That, aged, uh, poorly, rather quickly?

What you really want to know is whether he actually addresses his own comeuppance. So to speak.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: It’s still Louis CK. For better or for worse.

Memorable Jokes: The 52-year-old comedian makes light of his situation right away, insinuating it could’ve gone even worse for him, and realizing the adage of finding out who you real friends are isn’t nearly as fun as a reality than as a hypothetical.

You’ll have to wait until his penultimate bit, some 51 minutes into the special, for him to actually address his sexual misconduct, which he considers a kink that requires consent, even if he mines the idea of consent for jokes, in which both himself and his potential sexual partners are both victims. I’m going to quote him verbatim here, not to ruin any joke for you, but because his take on it — regardless of whether you accept it as his actual belief system or just another bit — is nevertheless newsworthy.

To wit:

“Here’s some advice that really only I can give you. Here’s my advice: If you ever ask somebody, ‘Can I jerk off in front of you?’ Shhh. Let me finish. I mean! (Wild applause) I mean, let me finish what I’m saying. Uhhhh. F—. OK. If you ever ask somebody, ‘May I jerk off in front of you?’ And they say ‘yes.’ Just say, ‘Are you sure?’ That’s the first part. And then if they say yes, just don’t f—ing do it. Just don’t do it. Cause look. Whatever you’re into, OK? Cause everybody’s got their thing. Whatever your thing is, I don’t know. You all have your thing. I don’t know what your thing is. You’re so f—ing lucky that I don’t know what your thing is. Do you understand how lucky you are? That people don’t know your thing? Because everybody knows my thing. Everybody knows my f—ing thing now. Obama knows my thing. Do you understand how that feels? To know that Obama was like, ‘Good Lord!’ Everybody in the world knows my thing. I got on an airplane in Italy, this little kid was like, ‘Momma that’s-a the guy who jacked off in front of the people!'”

CK waves his hand in self-awareness, then continues:

“So whatever your thing is. I don’t know what it is. Maybe you can’t cum unless you have your father on speakerphone. Whatever it is. If you want to do it with somebody else, you need to ask first. But if they say yes, you still don’t get to just go, ‘Woo!’ Charge ahead. You got to check in often. I guess that’s what I want to say. Check in. Because it’s not always clear how people feel. Like men are taught to make sure the woman is OK, but the thing is, women know how to seem OK when they’re not OK. So you can’t just look at her face and go, her eyes are dry, we’re fine. Just keep going. You gotta check in. Cause communication during sex can be very confusing. Like sometimes you’re with a woman, you’re having sex, she’s making noises. She’s going like, ‘oooh, ahhh,’ and you’re like, my God she loves it. Not necessarily. Sometimes they’re making those noises just to get through it, cause it’s easier to say ‘oooh’ than to say, ‘I hate how you f— me. Honestly, it’s awful.’ So she goes ‘ooooh baby.’ It’s kind of like a Negro spiritual. It’s Sorta similar. So to assume that she likes it is like if they heard slaves singing in the fields and you’re like, ‘Hey they’re having a great time out there!'”

And then he closes:

“I like jerking off. I don’t like being alone. That’s all I can tell you. I get lonely. Where is everyone? It’s just sad. I like company. I like to share. I’m good at it, too. If you’re good at juggling, you wouldn’t do it alone in the dark. You would gather folks and amaze them. Anyway, that’s all I’m gonna say about that s—.”

Our Take: Louis Székely purposely makes it rather difficult for any of us to separate the art from the artist.

Even when he’s making otherwise benign observations about geographic places, religious doctrines, CK wants to challenge our own moral compasses, throwing in one extraneously unnecessarily grotesque tag to test whether we’ll still laugh along. He goes in for nine minutes on, in his best Boston accent, “retahded” people and how our cultural perception has changed since the 1970s.

He either explicitly or implicitly presents multiple opportunities for self-reflection, more often than not choosing not to dive below the surface. In some instances, perhaps, a simple acknowledgement suffices. He can reveal fantasies about being mean in public, or how much he revels in transgressions: “I can’t stop doing it. I just. I like it. I like how it feels.” We can connect the dots ourselves. Or when he confides that his tour went global out of necessity, it’s self-explanatory: “I went to France last year, cause I thought I should leave the nation. Felt like a good idea. Would’ve left the planet if they had another one of those.”

Other times, the implication begs for more.

He jokingly imagines God holding a press conference to clear up so much confusion, yet himself has avoided all press since #MeToo came for him.

He proves truly sincere when discussing his mother’s death in the past year, and how he and his sisters observed her dying wishes. Or how his grandfather was the only member from his father’s side of the family to survive the Holocaust, escaping and finding refuge as a Hungarian Jew in Mexico. Or how he found love again with a Frenchwoman.

And yet. No matter how perverse or personal his comedy has been onstage or onscreen over the years, we’ve never seen his guard drop, never gotten too close to his truth.

So no, this is not Louis CK’s Richard Pryor: Live On The Sunset Strip moment. It’s not happening, no matter how much I or anyone else wanted or wished for it to happen. Then again, I’d wished CK had come out and admitted his flaws when Gawker first exposed him five years before he copped to it, only after the Times got his victims on the record. We may have wanted CK to be one of the all-time greats. I may have wanted that to be true. But the truth is, even as a critic who has interviewed him and other comedians over the past 20 years (disclosure: Louis once even introduced me to his mother at The Comedy Cellar), I have as much control over what a comedian does as I do over how others perceive me. Only so much, and yet not so much.

Our Call: STREAM IT if you remain a CK fan, because he remains in control of his comedy talents. SKIP IT if you were hoping for something more out of him.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Sincerely Louis CK on LouisCK.com