Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Tue Jan 01, 2019 7:27 pm

Well, his only remaining path to success are among people who don't mind his.....infraction. Of course you're going to get material like this.
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Tue Jan 01, 2019 10:40 pm

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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby iMURDAu » Wed Jan 02, 2019 12:16 am

God forbid a comedian known for saying the most shocking shit he can think of would attempt to relaunch his career by doing what got him to the top.

All of you that are perturbed by his set better never listen to his older stuff. It's way more harsh. Punching down is not a new thing for him. At all.

I read an article the other day in which the writer was outraged he used the word "nigger" openly on a "behind the scenes at a club" type of video from a few years ago. I'm guessing the stand up routine where Louis stated why white people shouldn't hide behind the "n-word" term was completely missed by that writer.

I'm not sure what everyone thinks Louis CK is famous for besides sexual harassment but if you take some time and think about it, there's really no good reason to be outraged by what he said the other day. Unless you've been pissed at him for years.

It really is like actions aren't taken as seriously as words. People at the moment seem to be more worried about what he said on stage at a comedy club as a comedian than what he did to other comedians that revered him. I don't get it. But I don't ever think I'm supposed to.
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby gisambards » Wed Jan 02, 2019 12:40 am

It demonstrates a massive misinterpretation of what made Louis CK such a good comedian to think that this leaked set is in the same category as his more successful material. What made him good wasn't simply that he intentionally stepped over lines, which any idiot can do, it was that he was often very insightful and clever, and at the very least always funny, about doing so. The set that's gotten him into trouble is offensiveness for its own sake, and doesn't have any sort of intelligence or effort at humour to it at all.
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby iMURDAu » Wed Jan 02, 2019 3:44 am

How would it not be in the same category?

Seriously, he's always been offensive for the sake of it. Just because there's no "intelligence" or "effort" behind it in your eyes doesn't make it true. Maybe he can't or doesn't want to try to reach the appeal of his more successful material. Maybe he is going to chase a certain segment of the population that nobody wants to associate with. But it's still his comedy and he owns it whether we ever enjoyed anything he did or not.

Unless the audio I heard was doctored, he was killing. We can parse shit down to the subatomic level but Larry the Cable Guy is going to outsell your favorite comic 99 times out of 100 in America just because git r dun, intelligence and effort at humor be damned.

And still his words from that set land like a bag of marshmallows when you think about him asking a woman (fill in the blanks yo self)
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby Crimson847 » Wed Jan 02, 2019 3:57 am

It's certainly not as polished as anything I've seen him do before, but this wasn't meant for the general public. It's the comedy version of a first draft or first practice session, and comedy is a fickle beast. It's not all that weird to throw everything you can at the wall first and see what sticks (i.e. gets laughs), then iterate on the hits later.

It does seem like a professional comedian ought to be able to do better than "your mom" jokes and Twitter memes even on a first draft, but since I laughed at this I'm not sure I'm anyone to say that a particular kind of joke is too dumb to ever possibly work and so shouldn't even be tried.
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby gisambards » Wed Jan 02, 2019 4:32 am

Performing at a comedy club is not the equivalent of a first draft. The audience at a comedy club is still the public, and it's still a gig. There will have already been a lot of preparation and editing of the set before any member of the public's seen any of it, and whilst, yes, part of is testing whether the stuff the comedian thinks might be good works or not, but it's about testing what is already a fairly refined set. The idea that comedians go to them to throw any random shit they've come up with at an audience is just not true.

And, to respond to iMURDAu, I was a fan of Louis CK for a long time, so I know what his comedy is, and he was a much better comedian than you're giving him credit for. If you thought he was always "offensive for the sake of it", then I think you were missing a lot of why he was funny.
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby Crimson847 » Wed Jan 02, 2019 11:42 am

gisambards wrote:Performing at a comedy club is not the equivalent of a first draft. The audience at a comedy club is still the public, and it's still a gig. There will have already been a lot of preparation and editing of the set before any member of the public's seen any of it, and whilst, yes, part of is testing whether the stuff the comedian thinks might be good works or not, but it's about testing what is already a fairly refined set. The idea that comedians go to them to throw any random shit they've come up with at an audience is just not true.


As a normative matter this might be true (sounds like you'd know better than I), but as a descriptive matter how else do you explain that joke?

the greatest living comedian in the world, apparently wrote:I sexually identify as a place. And that place is your mother's cunt.


I mean, if he steals ideas from 13-year-olds any more I'm pretty sure he's obliged to pay royalties.
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jan 02, 2019 9:58 pm

I've never found Louis CK very funny. I don't think anything he's said has made me laugh, and I feel like his shtick is mostly saying obvious stuff as offensively as possible. His bit on abortion comes to mind, or his bit on flying. He's mostly right on abortion though I found his bit crass and unfunny, while he's so wrong on flying I still consider it the most offensive thing he's ever said, and I'm nonbinary. But with both bits, I remember thinking "no duh, that's painfully obvious." The only Louis CK bit that I remember thinking "Oh, this is sort of clever," was the bit about getting the body you want. And I still didn't laugh at that.

And frankly "obvious and not funny" also describes the parts of the new set which got attention. Saying that many people get really offended by non-binary people asking them to use "they/them" is also obvious, which is the main reason I tell people to use whatever for me, even though I actually prefer "they/them." And surviving a mass shooting makes you as much and expert on gun violence as being laid off when your factory is moved to Mexico makes you an expert on global trade. I think the shoving a fat kid might be a reference to how some of the Parkland activist kids were bullies, but either way, he's saying something obvious in a gratuitously offensive way. Saying that Asian men look feminine is also obvious, and then he adds a bit about lesbian sex on top of it, which seems fully in character for him.

The new stuff does seem much rougher around the edges than the old stuff, but I can attribute that to this being experimental material. The big change for me is that his old stuff always tended to be on the left side of the culture wars. Sure he was often politically incorrect, I always felt like Louis CK was someone who tried way too hard to appear "woke." Complaining about nonbinary people and the Parkland kids does seem like he's shifted to the right on cultural issues, and I don't feel like watching the whole bit in order to see what else he said. Maybe he's shifted right, or maybe he's just getting old and cranky.
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby IamNotCreepy » Wed Jan 02, 2019 10:07 pm

Eh, I have a hard time getting worked up about this. I believe that even the most offensive humor can have value if it's funny. I will laugh at things that are in direct opposition to my strongest moral beliefs if it's clever or delivered in a humorous manner.

The problem is that this was material that he was still working on and refining. There's a chance he could have made it funny, and if I heard it, I would probably laugh, even if I didn't agree with it. Now? I guess we'll never know...
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby iMURDAu » Wed Jan 02, 2019 11:34 pm

@gis What I mean is he's always used offensive terms and phrasing to get an audience to follow him. I was just super brief with my words. I've been in a lot of pain since Saturday and it's hard to get thoughts across clearly.
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby Aquila89 » Thu Jan 03, 2019 3:27 pm

cmsellers wrote:I And surviving a mass shooting makes you as much and expert on gun violence as being laid off when your factory is moved to Mexico makes you an expert on global trade. I think the shoving a fat kid might be a reference to how some of the Parkland activist kids were bullies,


Were they? I believe that's just something right-wingers claimed using out-of-context quotes.
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby ghijkmnop » Thu Jan 03, 2019 5:01 pm

Redacted
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Last edited by ghijkmnop on Thu Mar 14, 2019 2:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby cmsellers » Thu Jan 03, 2019 5:51 pm

Aquila89 wrote:Were they? I believe that's just something right-wingers claimed using out-of-context quotes.

I was wondering how you could put that quote into a context that didn't make it sound bad, but wow, the context completely reverses the meaning.

I think I may have been biased by the way that the Parkland activist kids reminded me of some activists I associated with at my high school. They were all attractive people, I was the only fat member of the club, and probably the only disabled one, and they constantly did things socially together without inviting me. I wouldn't have wanted to go to most of their extracurricular events anyways, which almost always involved drug use, but I was always a little hurt never to be invited. They weren't really mean to me, just cold, but only one of them was actually nice to me. And I was someone who shared most of their political views and worked for the same things they did; they could be downright nasty to people outside their circle entirely. So when I heard the quote which suggested the attractive activists ostracized the shooter for being weird, I just thought "yeah, that sounds about right," and didn't investigate further.
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Re: Louis CK sexual harassment "rumors"

Postby gisambards » Thu Jan 03, 2019 7:39 pm

ghijkmnop wrote:
gisambards wrote:Performing at a comedy club is not the equivalent of a first draft. The audience at a comedy club is still the public, and it's still a gig. There will have already been a lot of preparation and editing of the set before any member of the public's seen any of it, and whilst, yes, part of is testing whether the stuff the comedian thinks might be good works or not, but it's about testing what is already a fairly refined set. The idea that comedians go to them to throw any random shit they've come up with at an audience is just not true.

And, to respond to iMURDAu, I was a fan of Louis CK for a long time, so I know what his comedy is, and he was a much better comedian than you're giving him credit for. If you thought he was always "offensive for the sake of it", then I think you were missing a lot of why he was funny.


There are a lot of comedians who would disagree with that statement. Maron and Burr come to mind immediately.


What about either of those comedians would lead you to believe that about them? Bill Burr in particular was notable for the sheer amount of effort he put into performing at comedy clubs before he became mainstream famous.
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