A year ago, the comic promised to reflect on his behavior after admitting to sexual misconduct. Now, he’s making jokes about the inconvenience of empathy.
A little over a year ago, Louis C. K. published a statement in The New York Times, after several women came forward to confirm the rumors that had, for years, been swirling around him . “These stories are true,” he wrote, expressing regret for several instances of sexual misconduct and suggesting that the acts being made public would be a turning point for him. His confession concluded with contrition: “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want,” C. K. wrote. “I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”
The statement was, for all its labored hand-wringing—a literary critic might think of it as foreshadowing—not an apology. It was instead, like so much of C. K.’s comedy, notably self-centered. In its nods toward introspection, though, the statement was marginally better than the half-hearted defenses offered by many other men of #MeToo, and so it was accommodated, in many quarters, with relief and a great deal of patience: Maybe he could learn. Maybe he could do better. Maybe he could find a way to make amends to the women whose persons he had disrespected and whose careers he had compromised. C. K., with more TK: maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
But 2018 has been a year of hard truths, and here, just before the calendar turns its page to whatever fresh hell might lie in wait, is one more: C. K.’s promise to listen and learn, it seems, was itself a lie. On Sunday evening, instead, an audio recording of a recent appearance C. K. made, reportedly, at Long Island’s Governor’s comedy club leaked on YouTube. The set suggests that, while C. K. may have been up to a lot of activities over the past year, listening and learning have not been among them.
In the set—one of many unscheduled appearances he has made as part of a quiet comeback—C. K. makes jokes about the word “retarded.” (He bemoans being unable to use the word as an apparent compromise on his freedom of self-expression.) He mocks the activist students of Parkland, who have been trying to convert a personal tragedy into social good. (“You’re not interesting because you went to a high school where kids got shot. Why does that mean I have to listen to you? How does that make you interesting? You didn’t get shot, you pushed some fat kid in the way, and now I gotta listen to you talking?”) C. K. also mocks Asian men, and black men, and nonbinary people. (“‘You should address me as they/them, because I identify as gender neutral,’” C. K. says, dripping with sarcasm. “Oh, okay. Okay.
