Recap Louis CK at The Pabst Theater

Professionally speaking, times are good for Louis CK. He was at The Pabst Theater on Saturday for two sold-out shows that were being filmed for an upcoming concert movie. He received national press for his hilariously insightful “everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy” bit that he unveiled last fall on Late Night On Conan O’Brien and has since become a YouTube hit. And he's generally regarded as one of the best comics working today.

CK, clearly, is king shit of fuck mountain. And yet, as he admitted late in his 90-minute set during Saturday’s early show, it’s also been a “weird year” since his previous performance at the Pabst last February. Back then, he was a married schlub trying to maintain his sanity while sharing a house with a ball-busting wife and two young daughters. Now, he’s a newly single 41-year-old schlub who’s thinking that “maybe I’ll do the second half gay.” A comedy act should hardly be seen as a window into a person’s soul, but it's safe to assume that CK has probably been miserable at home lately. As funny as he was on Saturday night, you couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the guy.

Not that CK was going for sympathy points when he talked about his recent divorce. When the audience tried to express its remorse, he quickly shushed them, pointing out that “good marriages have ended in divorce exactly zero times.” And, truth be told, getting divorced certainly helped CK comedically. His marriage-oriented material was a weak point in the past, leaning on tired “my wife never fucks me” jokes that round out comedy sets in clubs from Portland, Maine to Portland, Ore. But CK was consistently spot-on when talking about his break-up. “It’s like having a bunch of currency for a country that doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. CK joked that he can’t even bring himself to jerk off to Girls Gone Wild videos: “I’m a father; I’m just getting mad at everyone in the video.”

The centerpiece of CK’s current act is the bit that was popularized on Conan, where he rails against spoiled-brat complaints about amazing technological advances like cell phones and air travel. “We’re like fat 8th graders,” he ranted. If they could hear us bitch about minor delays at airports, “the Wright brothers would kick us in the cunt.” CK’s points about “white people problems”—"where your life is so amazing, you make up shit to be upset about"—are pretty much perfect, and, fortunately, didn’t suffer from being overly familiar. (It helped that TV censors didn’t prevent him from calling us “the shittiest generation of piece of shit assholes.”)

Which brings me to the best part of seeing CK: the profanity. Now, swearing is not automatically funny, but in the hands of a true wordsmith like CK, it almost is. Call me a total pleb, but I laugh really hard when British people are described as “pig-faced miserable cunts.” In my book, if a guy can promise to “rip out your asshole, throw it on the wall, and dive through to another dimension,” he deserves all the success in the world. So, God bless Louis CK.