Louis C.K.’s Return to Normalcy
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 …
