Louis C.K.’s Next Chapter

These days, C.K. occupies a strange place in the culture. He is in a cancellation limbo, joined by the likes of Chris Brown and Andrew Cuomo. C.K. isn’t too cancelled to perform several sold-out shows at the Beacon, but he’s cancelled enough that, if you manage to snag a ticket, you might not want to brag about it to your co-workers. He’s cancelled enough that, if the show is one of his strongest standup routines in years, you may write about it, but not without mentioning that he’s disgraced.

Comebacks are trickier for some than others. Even at the height of the #MeToo era, we decided that some people were candidates for eventual rehabilitation, and then we set them aside for later, like incomplete tasks. But we haven’t figured out what, exactly, that comeback process should look like. A public apology is required. Then that person should probably go away for a while. (We seem to imagine that the cancelled person is roughing it in a basement somewhere, “Bugonia”-style, when it’s more likely a private island–yoga–wellness spa, or, like, New Hampshire.) While they’re gone, they might want to get some form of treatment—therapy, rehab. Then, after we’ve forgotten about their existence, they should offer us a great work, channelling the worst things they’ve ever done, their overwhelming guilt and shame, and their newfound clarity into the finest content they’ve ever made.

Perhaps this is where C.K. went wrong. After a nine-month exile, he resumed performing at New York comedy clubs and, later, in Europe. In 2020, he self-financed a special called “Sincerely Louis C.K.,” in which he publicly addressed his misdeeds for the first time onstage but failed to do so in a way that would live up to the special’s title. “I learned a lot,” he said. “I learned how to eat alone in a restaurant with people giving me the finger from across the room.” Later, he explained, “I like jerking off. I don’t like being alone.” He added, “I’m good at it, too. If you’re good at juggling, you wouldn’t do it alone in the dark.”

A year later, C.K. filmed a special called “Sorry”—seemingly a response to criticism that he didn’t use the word in his public apology, which instead leaned on words like “remorseful” and “regret.” That indignance carried over into the special itself, which didn’t touch on the situation at all—a meta joke—but included some of the best comedy that C.K. 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 the “How ’bout them apples?” scene from the movie “Good Will Hunting.”

This is C.K. at his finest. The weaker parts of “Ridiculous” are, in fact, the crude one-offs: C.K. is apparently unable to talk about a kid without shoehorning in a joke about pedophilia; he has a habit of mentioning his late mother and then sexualizing her. Although some critics have pointed out that it’s harder to laugh at these types of jokes now, because they’re dependent on the audience trusting that C.K. isn’t truly a creep, even blissfully ignorant viewers might find these bits tedious. They’re lazy. It’s like wearing a suit and then pairing it with Crocs.

C.K.’s strongest jokes are propelled by his cranky observational style, his fixation on the bizarre aspects of life that the rest of us have never noticed, have never been able to articulate, or have become accustomed to tuning out. In “Ridiculous,” he captures the weirdness of being an empty nester through an anecdote about “these ladies”—his two daughters—who intermittently come over, and who are basically unrecognizable to him. (“It’s like having a cat that turned into a mailman.”) He takes issue with the redundancy of courtroom oaths, which should end with the witness promising “to tell the truth.” (What’s this “whole truth, and nothing but the truth” business?) He wonders why doughnut boxes have windows. He talks about how the worst feeling in the world is waking up on a plane. There’s something amusing, almost impressive, about someone using his platform—a platform that he briefly lost and has been trying to reclaim—to comment on chicken packaging.

When my friends and I arrived at the Beacon to see “Ridiculous,” there was a long line of people waiting to buy drinks, but there was no one in line waiting 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 the book. All she said was that the protagonist had a tough life: “A lot of things happen to him.” This felt like a disappointing description, though I’d later discover that it was dead-on. Ingram is a boy, probably ten or so, who lives on a farm in rural Texas, where his parents force him to sleep in a shed. The farm is at risk of being repossessed; Ingram’s dad slaughters nearly all the animals, and then he rides his horse into town in order to sell it. He never comes back. Soon enough, the family runs out of food, leaving Ingram’s mother with just one option. Ingram explains, “My mother walked me out of the house and onto the porch and gave me some pork she’d tied up in a rag, and she said, ‘You need to head off, Ingram. There’s no home or family here now.’ ”

And so Ingram heads off. The comedian Theo Von compared the book, with its drifter child protagonist, to “an emotional ‘Huck Finn.’ ” The themes and the setting also call to mind Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner; C.K. has said that he was inspired by Flannery O’Connor. But what he’s produced is something closer to the relentless torture of Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life,” minus the beautiful prose and complex characters. On his long walk to nowhere, Ingram contends with hunger, thirst, extreme poverty, various injuries, and the occasional beating. While bathing in a stream, he gets carried away by the current and narrowly escapes a waterfall; he arrives in Houston, nude. Later, he’s swept up in a tornado, breaking his arm and losing several months’ worth of earnings. Throughout the book, he encounters a series of temporary father figures, all of whom disappear or die, often brutally. When he finally gets some stability—working in the oil fields outside Austin—there’s an explosion, killing ninety-seven men. Ingram only barely makes it out alive.