I recently listened to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast interview with Mike Birbiglia, who shares an agent with Louis C.K. While discussing taking meetings with television people, Birbligia said that he and seemingly every other comic out there pined for what he called “The Louie C.K. deal”: complete creative freedom in exchange for less money. To stand-up comics desperate for the exposure and money and celebrity that regularly appearing on television brings, yet freaked out about selling out or compromising, it’s ideal.
Listening to WTF and other comedy podcasts like Jimmy Pardo’s Never Not Funny and Comedy Death Ray Radio I get the sense that C.K. has reached an enviable place in his career where many of his peers and friends resent his success and envy his work ethic, talent and determination. This seems strange. C.K. is enormously successful, albeit in a very narrow way. I suspect that C.K’s name would prompt shrugs and blank stares from the vast majority of the American public but within a small sphere of comedy geeks and comedians he’s a superstar.
He’s living the dream, writing, directing, editing and starring in a show that reflects his sensibility in the purest possible manner, with no network input and no outside directors or writers telling him what he can and cannot do. C.K. is doing everything his way and succeeding. He may not have the adoration of the masses but he commands the respect of his peers and critics as well as fans who flock to see him in increasingly large venues.
In the past I’ve called Louie a show about everything. In tonight’s episode C.K. stops wasting his time addressing minor concerns like class, race, sexuality, divorce, dating, childhood, and aging and finally tackles something important: God.
“God” begins, as all serious explorations of faith, martyrdom and the existence or non-existence of God must begin, with our intrepid hero in a bathroom with a glory hole underneath graffiti reading, “Heaven.” C.K. is appropriately horrified when he sees a conservatively dressed middle-aged man getting ready to stick his dick in the hole.
When C.K. asks him why on earth he’d put himself into such a vulnerable position without knowing what lurked on the other side of the glory hole, the stranger replies, “I don’t know. You’ve gotta have faith.” In the grand tradition of Louie, the moment finds pathos and philosophy and deep meaning in the seemingly crude and scatological. In many ways, the stranger’s response represents the key line of dialogue in an episode that asks, “Do you really have to have faith? Why?”
Faith. It’s a tricky concept that unites believers of all stripes, from Evangelical Christians to dudes blessed with absolute confidence that a glory hole will contain the best blow-job of their life and not the sinister snip of a pair of scissors. You’ve gotta have faith.
This segues to C.K. onstage alternately describing God as an asshole, a jerky friend and a shitty girlfriend. After all, what kind of sane, benevolent deity would ask one of his followers to sacrifice his son to test his faith, as G-d did to Abraham when he asked him to sacrifice Isaac? C.K. depicts God as an egomaniacal asshole who puts “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain” in the ten commandments rather than rape, which is, perhaps, some might argue, a more serious offense.
We then flash back to C.K’s childhood in a Catholic school where a nun struggles to convey the enormity of Jesus’ sacrifice. In desperation, she takes her class to a church where they meet a dark, towering figure played by a perfectly cast Tom Noonan. Noonan, it seems, is a medical doctor, or judging by his creepiness and intensity, perhaps a disgraced former medical doctor, who describes Jesus’ crucifixion in gruesomely graphic physical terms, lingering unhealthily on every torment Jesus suffered while being whipped with a flagellum and nailed to a cross. Noonan brings an unseemly relish to the words, “brutal punishment.”