CK occupies a strange place in culture today. He is in limbo, people like him join him Chris Brown and Andrew Cuomo. CK isn't canceled enough to warrant multiple sold-out shows at the Beacon, but it's canceled enough that if you do manage to snag a ticket, you might not want to brag about it to your co-workers. He's canceled so much that if this show ends up being one of his strongest stand-ups in years, you can write about it, but not without mentioning that he's disgraced.
For some, returning is more difficult than for others. Even in the midst of the #MeToo era, we decided that some people were candidates for possible rehabilitation, and then shelved them for later as unfinished tasks. But we haven't yet figured out exactly what that return process should look like. A public apology is required. Then that person should probably go away for a while. (We seem to imagine the canceler pottering around in a Bugonia-style basement somewhere, although it's more likely a private island, a yoga-health spa, or, say, New Hampshire.) While he's away, he might want to get some form of treatment—therapy, rehab. Then, after we forget they exist, they should offer us a great job channeling the worst things they've ever done, their overwhelming guilt and shame, and their newfound clarity into the best content they've ever created.
Maybe CK was wrong here. After a nine-month exile, he resumed performing in comedy clubs in New York and then in Europe. In 2020, he self-financed a special called “Sincerely, Louis C.K.,” in which he spoke publicly about his misdeeds on stage for the first time, but failed to do so in a way that lived up to the special's title. “I learned a lot,” he said. “I learned to eat alone in a restaurant by having people point at me from across the room.” He later explained: “I like to jerk off. I don't like to be alone.” He added: “I'm good at it too. If you can juggle, you wouldn't do it alone in the dark.”
A year later, CK filmed a special called “Sorry” – apparently in response to criticism that he did not use the word in his public apology, which instead relied on words like “repentant” and “regret.” That outrage carried over into the episode itself, which didn't address the situation at all (meta joke) but included some of the best comedy CK has ever performed, including a discussion of a news story about an obese woman who had to go to the zoo to get an MRI and an extended riff on “What about apples?” Scene from the movie Good Will Hunting.
This is CK at its finest. The weaker parts of “Funny” are actually crude one-offs: CK apparently can't talk about a child without shoehorning in a joke about pedophilia; he has a habit of mentioning his late mother and then sexualizing her. While some critics have noted that it is harder to laugh at such jokes now because they depend on the audience believing that CK isn't actually a jerk, even blissfully clueless viewers can find these segments tiresome. They are lazy. It's like wearing a suit and pairing it with Crocs.
C.K.'s most powerful jokes come from his moody, observational style, his fixation on the quirky aspects of life that the rest of us have never noticed, have never been able to articulate, or have grown accustomed to ignoring. In “Funny,” he conveys the strangeness of being an empty nester through an anecdote about “those ladies”—his two daughters—who come to see him from time to time and who are virtually unrecognizable to him. (“It's like the cat turned into a mailman.”) He disagrees with the redundancy of courtroom oaths, which must end with the witness promising to “tell the truth.” (What is this “the whole truth and nothing but the truth”?) He wonders why donut boxes have windows. He talks about how the worst feeling in the world is waking up on a plane. There's something funny, almost impressive, about someone using his platform—a platform he briefly lost and is trying to reclaim—to comment on chicken packaging.
When my friends and I went to the Lighthouse to see Ridiculous, there was a long line of people waiting to buy drinks, but there was no one in line to buy a signed copy of C.K.'s first novel.”Ingram“, which had just come out. We asked the cashier what she knew about this book. She only said that the main character had a hard life: “A lot of things happen to him.” I found this description disappointing, although I later discovered that it was completely accurate. Ingram is a boy of about ten or so who lives on a farm in rural Texas, where his parents force him to sleep in a barn. The farm is in danger of being repossessed; Ingram's father slaughters almost all the animals and then rides his horse to town to sell it. He never returns. Soon the family runs out of food, and Ingram's mother has only one choice. “My mother took me out of the house onto the porch, gave me some pork, which she tied in a rag, and said, “It's time for you to go, Ingram, there's no home here now.”
And Ingram leaves. Comedian Theo Von compared the book, with its child drifter protagonist, to an “emotional 'Huck Finn'.” The themes and setting are also reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner; CK said he was inspired by Flannery O'Connor. But what he created is closer to the merciless torture of Hanya Yanagihara.”Little life“, without beautiful prose or complex characters. During his long journey to nowhere, Ingram struggles with hunger, thirst, extreme poverty, various injuries, and the occasional beating. While swimming in a creek, he is swept away by a current and has a narrow escape from a waterfall; he arrives in Houston naked. He is later caught in a tornado, breaks his arm, and loses several months of earnings. Throughout the book, he meets a number of temporary father figures, all of whom disappear or they die, often brutally.
