Louis CK's amazing, everyone's happy
louisck.net
CK recently did a USO tour of the Middle East, but he's still freaked out by America.
Louis CK’s sold-out show on Thursday night at the Barrymore Theatre started out on a reliably frank, self-loathing level, but by the time he finished up an hour and a half later, he had gut-punched his way to a higher level of outraged purging. Sure, there's a difference between stuff that gets you some acerbic laughs and stuff that leaves you feeling a bit better about life in general. When you're already one of the best stand-up comedians in the world, the only way to push it further is to take your work to a more fiery, more humanistic level. And CK eases the emotional void left by the likes of George Carlin and Bill Hicks with bits like "everything's amazing, nobody's happy,” a related one on the pilot who heroically crash-landed a plane on the Hudson River, and yet another on overhearing conversations in a Starbucks. Oh yeah, CK still admitted to being a fat schlub and a screwy father who neglects to recycle, but he's now using the goodwill that stuff earned him to effectively warn people: Watch out that you don't turn into something even shittier.
Before introducing monotone and subtly clever opener Dan Mintz, who served as a writer on CK's short-lived but great HBO sitcom Lucky Louie, CK stood backstage and made a bunch of silly announcements in a falsetto voice, like, "No one is allowed in the theater during the performance." Comedy openers tend to get the shaft, but Mintz's bits were quite good once you got into his subtle wordplay: "I took one of those personality tests… came back negative." Decider's favorite was probably his bit about using every part of the animals he kills while hunting. For example, polar bears: "I used the jawbone to make a knife, and I used the rest of the animal to have sex with."
After that, CK ambled out in his usual non-stage-outfit of blue jeans, sneakers, and black T-shirt. Someone in the full house yelled out "suck a bag of dicks," referring to one of CK's most crowd-pleasing bits. CK laughed it off and began with a bit about accidentally sputtering out the phrase "shit the dick of Christ," speculating aloud about what he might have actually meant by that.
His stage schtick continues to be a non-schtick—he doesn't act too tough or too silly, and he still punctuates a lot of his material with little exhalations of nervous laughter and embarrassed-looking grins. He still finds his two daughters endlessly fascinating and infuriating. Just like any other parent, he's got some tremendous fuck-ups to confess to—especially the way he described the end of the world to his daughter, explaining that one day "the sun's going to explode," but long after she and everyone she knew dies: "She learned all that in about 12 seconds." He sings his kids sad Simon & Garfunkel songs, which they then end up singing into their cereal at breakfast. He gets into screaming arguments with them when they refer to Fig Newtons as "Pig Newtons." And the epic bit about how one of his kids ended up taking a huge shit on the floor? We refuse to spoil that for you.
He's not done tearing into his own physique, either. He's got balls that "look like they're being rescued by a helicopter" and a "Dr.-Seuss-tree penis." Look, he did more than an hour and a half of material, which is actually quite generous for a single set.
As he started getting into the "everything's amazing" bit, people recognized it and started cheering, which caused CK to hesitate. "Oh, you all know this… I'll do it with swearing." He didn't lazily toss this one off, either, as he plowed through the misery we create for ourselves despite technological miracles that surround us. "We don't have problems here … but we suck at this." Take sitting on the runway in a delayed plane, for example: "That's a hardship…. Folks will listen to that fuckin' story!" And later, "The Wright Brothers would've kicked us all right in the cunt."
CK came back out for an encore, too, telling the crowd, "You've indulged a bunch of new material, so thanks." Then he did the bit that explains the title of Hilarious, the special he recently recorded in Milwaukee. Sadly, he didn't really have to exaggerate that much to make fun of a couple of conversations he overheard recently in a Starbucks: These people were "secreting" words in their nasally, lazy voices. But he specifically targeted this exchange: "I saw Lisa the other day." "That's hilarious." "We go to the top shelf with our words now," Louis ranted, drilling home the point that something that's "hilarious" should be so funny that it fucks your life up. "That's what the whole country sounds like… fat 8th-graders." As Katjusa Cisar's review over at 77 Square implies, the show actually had the power to fucking make people want to be better people and appreciate life more. The man's been pushing his craft toward understated greatness for years, and now he's moved up to a whole 'nother bag of dicks.
