The Porcupine Tribune

A recent 50 minute set from comedian Louis C. K. has leaked on Twitter and roughly two minutes of it have sent Twitter into yet another outrage frenzy. During portion in question, Louis C.K. pokes fun at the idea of being told to refer to individuals by the plural pronouns “they” and “them,” and at the seriousness and prominence of the Parkland school shooting survivors. He does not mention the Parkland students specifically, but is almost certainly referring to them when he talks about teens testifying before Congress and when he states “you went to a high school where kids got shot, why does that mean I have to listen to you? Why does that make you interesting? You didn't get shot. You pushed some fat kid in the way and now I gotta listen to you talking?”

None of this is really constitutes uncharted territory for Louis C. K., who built his entire career on jokes of this nature: for the unfamiliar, his rise to fame was filled with envelope pushing, whether discussing having sex with dead children or describing in extreme detail graphic sexual acts, and made frequent use of words such as “N****r” and “F****t” (see literally any Louis C. K. set for examples). Before Louis C. K.’s fall from grace following the 2017 sexual misconduct allegations against him, he had become one of the most prominent and highest paid comedians in the world, and yet very rarely (if ever) found himself in the “hot water” of the humor police. So make no mistake: the outrage following these most recent jokes is not about the jokes themselves, but rather about the man himself.

More discussion on the events that transpired and on the requirements for his path to redemption would surely be useful, as would a deeper dive on the broader and age old “art vs. artist” debate (for my part, if you’re able to retroactively dismiss and stop watching “Annie Hall,” “American Beauty,” and “Chinatown,” et al, then more power to you, but I’m not there myself). But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend this was actually about the jokes.

It’s easy to dismiss “low” and “crass” comedy as sophomoric and dumb, but some of the world’s great art is littered with it. Mozart was a big on scatalogical humor (so much so that there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the topic, found here). And I don’t know that it would be unreasonable to say that about 75% of Chaucer is dick and fart jokes (in fact, that director Pier Paolo Pasolini understood this is what made his 1972 version of “The Canterbury Tales” such a delight). The outrageous and unsafe can, in fact, be funny. Moreover, it can poignant in a way that the safe and conventional cannot.

Throughout his career, Louis C. K. has sought to do this: nearly every joke he has made, no matter how crude, how vulgar, seeks to act as a kind of commentary. These jokes are no exception. While most have taken the path of least resistance and commented on the surface level “offenses,” there are questions in these jokes that deserve consideration. Despite the references to the non-binary gender crowd and Parkland survivors, the jokes aren’t about them; Louis C. K. wants to know about a much broader group, a new royalty that creates and enforces the new rules of social etiquette and conduct. He wants to know who they think they are and from where they believe this power comes.

As Sonny Bunch of Washington Free Beacon put it in 2015 (Policing Comedy and Defining Terms of Debate) “When we decide what others are allowed to joke about, we decide what is allowed to be discussed, period. It narrows the terms debate”. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, this new royalty has called foul, as if on cue. If we continue to outline content parameters for comedians, not only will comedy cease to be funny, it will also cease to matter.

- John Dos Passos Dos