Nearly halfway through his latest special, Ridiculous, Louis C.K. asks his audience to help out with a joke. When he announces “I’m so old!,” the crowd is meant to respond in unison, “How old are you?” Another comedian might answer with an exaggerated zinger. Instead, C.K. deadpans a series of grim realities about aging that are funny by way of being uncomfortably candid. How old is C.K.? “I am so old that I live in the present for the first time,” he answers, “not from wisdom or courage but from fear, because there’s too much of the past and not enough of the future.”
C.K.’s well-honed, self-deprecating style ties together much of the material in Ridiculous, which interweaves coarse throwaway bits about provocative subject matter—child molestation, the Holocaust, and AIDS (the latter is mentioned several times)—with observational humor from his own life, such as relocating his father to a nursing home. It’s a recognizable mixture of ideas that he’s riffed on for multiple decades, conveyed as a monologue that feels familiar for those acquainted with C.K.’s comedy.
What makes Ridiculous notable is that it’s his first special released on Netflix since the company publicly cut ties with him in the fall of 2017, after The New York Times published allegations from five women who reported unwanted sexual attention from the comedian. (“The hardest regret to live with is what you’ve done to hurt someone else,” C.K. said in a statement about the allegations. “And I can hardly wrap my head around the scope of hurt I brought on them.”) In the interim eight and a half years, C.K. has not so much staged a big comeback as he has quietly reclaimed a smaller portion of the enormous spotlight he once held. He’s continued to regularly perform live stand-up—both at drop-ins at the Comedy Cellar and at much larger venues such as Madison Square Garden—and pursued non-comedy projects including an audio series of conversations with his former girlfriend Blanche Gardin and Ingram, a picaresque novel published last year about a farm boy enduring interminable hardship, seemingly inspired by the works of Mark Twain and Flannery O’Connor.
C.K.’s career is more or less back on track, even if some people still put an asterisk beside his name. So I wasn’t exactly surprised that he doesn’t mention the nearly decade-old allegations in the new special. But the elision makes certain portions of Ridiculous tough to buy, such as when C.K. cracks about his dating life that “nobody gets to 58 single without a horrible fuckin’ life.” There’s some abstract truth in that statement, sure, but it’s missing some pretty crucial context—and although the audience may know what he’s leaving out, the joke ends up unsatisfyingly hollow, as does much of the special.
In April 2020, C.K. self-released a filmed stand-up special, Sincerely Louis C.K.—his first since the Times investigation—without advance notice. At the top of the show, which eventually won a Grammy for Best Comedy Album, the comic cheekily addressed the allegations: “How was your last couple of years? Anybody else get in global amounts of trouble?”
Toward the end, he offered some humorous “advice”: “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 fuckin’ do it.” He proceeded to bemoan the fact that everyone knows about his kink before underlining the importance of frequent communication during sex. (“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!”) C.K.’s prevaricating, hesitant delivery of these jokes complicated any hard-line interpretations of his real feelings. He didn’t sound completely penitent, but he certainly seemed uncomfortable talking about what happened, even when he leaned into being a stinker. Nevertheless, it was a far cry from, say, the way Aziz Ansari talked about facing an accusation of being sexually aggressive during a date with a younger woman—with remorse, and no wise cracks—in his 2019 special, Aziz Ansari: Right Now. C.K.’s follow-up special, Sorry/Not Sorry, also didn’t contain an explicit apology, making the title a glib meta joke.
Anyone hoping for a look inside C.K.’s head might have been more intrigued by his fourth feature film, 2022’s Fourth of July. The film is about Jeff, a recovering alcoholic jazz pianist struggling to confront his dysfunctional family about the emotional abuse he suffered as a child. Self-financed by C.K. and co-written with the comedian Joe List (who also stars as Jeff), Fourth of July isn’t especially successful for mundane reasons: The writing and direction are inconsistent; the ensemble lacks chemistry. The film is, however, an earnest examination of apologies—the value of them, and what it means to want one and not receive it.
The disarming streak of honesty in Fourth of July is based less on C.K.’s personal struggles and more on List’s real-life sobriety, the mechanics of 12-step programs, and the lingering effects of hands-off, tough-love parents. Still, it’s difficult not to connect Jeff’s desperate attempt to get his family to simply acknowledge their casually cruel, emotionally erratic behavior with C.K.’s public difficulties. In the movie, C.K. plays Jeff’s therapist, who at one point proposes that Jeff isn’t suffering enough to actually improve his outlook on life. “If you were in more pain and enough pain,” he says, “you might seek a real solution. That’s how some people might view it.”
Whether C.K. has suffered enough, or whether a “real solution” even exists, is not for me to decide. But he has inched toward a deeper contrition. In an interview with the podcaster Theo Von last September, C.K. reflected at length on his life post-allegations. He explained that he felt free after the news broke, because he had been lying to himself about what he was doing. He admitted that if his reputation hadn’t been damaged, his behavior would’ve likely gotten worse. He acknowledged that he hurt his loved ones and the women who accused him, accepted that many people will never forgive him, and discussed the amends he has attempted to make.
In some ways, this podcast appearance was the apology many people desired—and felt was missing from his 2017 statement, in which he said he was only then digesting the impact of his actions. (C.K. implies in the interview that he wasn’t emotionally capable of going deeper then.) To my ears, his remarks exhibited genuine shame, though it’s certainly possible to read them as opportunistic self-pity. Regardless, the gap between his earlier, carefully worded comments and his more considered, lengthy reflection on a popular podcast is notable.
This type of transparency would’ve certainly made for a different Netflix special. Instead, one of the two best jokes in Ridiculous is about chicken breasts. C.K. explains how much he loves the soaker pad that comes in a package of chicken, likening it to “a Maxi Pad but soaked in raw chicken water” and suggesting that the object is proof that we don’t live in a simulation. “That pad would not be in the Matrix,” he says. “That’s people.” He imagines a factory in an Ohio town that produces these pads, and the fictional billionaire smugly saying that he’s “making a fortune on those chicken tampons.”
The second joke is about Buddhism and features C.K.’s take on an old Chinese parable. A baby is born in a village and, as a small child, permanently injures his leg, which eventually keeps him from fighting in a brutal war. After each joyous or horrible event, a Buddhist master wisely comments, “We’ll see.” C.K. then adds his own spin about the boy’s father getting drunk and decapitating his child, leaving the monk at a loss. After pausing for the right amount of time, he says, “The point of the story is that Buddhism is limited.”
The strong parts of Ridiculous usually fall along these fantastical or absurdist lines. Some nonchalant one-liners pack a snort-level punch. C.K. still excels at cantankerous turns of phrase, like when he exaggerates the depressing conditions of his father’s nursing home, describing how the patients are “jackknifed around the halls” in wheelchairs, like “a game of bumper cars where they turned the power off … and then everybody died.”
Yet Ridiculous remains uninvolving compared with C.K.’s pre-2017 specials, which fits a pattern: His post-allegation jokes just aren’t as memorable as his most acclaimed routines, such as when he described fielding a series of quasi-Socratic questions from his young daughter that culminated in him deconstructing the precepts of reality. Where, in an earlier era, audiences adored C.K. in part because of how authentically himself he seemed onstage, the actual distance between C.K.’s offstage identity and his onstage persona has now become unavoidable. In his interview with Von, for example, C.K. seemed to recognize this underlying tension in his current comedy. As he much as he wants to “come out and tell people I’m fuckin’ sorry,” he told the podcaster, he believes that process is a “private thing,” not a “famous-guy act.” In his eyes, the stage isn’t an appropriate venue for such discussion, because his words might be used by other people for their own ends; the implication is that, despite how “raw” he feels in front of a crowd, whatever he says will be inevitably misunderstood.
C.K.’s decision to eschew a more confessional mode in his act is obviously his right; he doesn’t owe his audience anything more than what he’s willing to give. But I can’t ignore the fact that I—and many others—initially fell for his stand-up, as well as his television shows Louie and Horace and Pete, because he put his own life into his confrontational, oft-incendiary material. He frequently implicated himself, and his audience, with stories of his personal failures and moral limitations in service of answering big questions about contemporary life—all while making people laugh.
His choice to reckon with his actions mostly in private might be a needed act of self-preservation, but it results in work that’s stunted by design. Per his own words, it feels stuck in the past, not looking toward the future.