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Back in 2022, I went to one of Louis C.K.’s first European “comeback” arena shows in London, after his so-called cancellation in 2017 for sexually harassing multiple women, and I wrote about it for this magazine. After the show, I met another audience member who was finishing off his popcorn in the foyer. “Is there ever a way back, for someone like Louis, who held substantial power in his industry, did something wrong, and held his hands up?” he asked.
“How do we define whether he’s paid his dues or not?”
One way to define that, in market terms, might be a Netflix comedy special. For the first time since he was dropped by all networks and distributors affiliated with him in 2017, Louis C.K. is back in mainstream media. He headlined the Netflix Is a Joke festival at the Hollywood Bowl back in May, and on Tuesday, he releases a new one-hour special on the platform, titled Ridiculous. Instagram comments on the release announcement on C.K.’s own page included: “So happy the big doors are open again,” “we are so back,” and “Please don’t get cancelled again.”
The material in this new special isn’t nasty and bitter, as some of the material he was doing immediately after his “cancellation” was. It’s classic C.K.: superficially offensive but actually taking a kind of gleefully amoral route to morally defensible positions. And funny, too. There are jokes about the pleasure of putting his dad in an old folks’ home; seeing the only nature he’s ever seen in New York in 1997, which was a dead bee. Also, you know, AIDS, and being breastfed by his mother into adulthood. He seems a little more at peace with himself, more mellow than he has in the past. He’s getting old, and claims in his self-deprecating way to be enjoying it. He does not mention jerking off in front of people. You can tell, from his onstage affect, that 2017 is a long time ago, from his perspective.
But what about from ours, as the audience? What is supposed to happen after someone gets “canceled”? Especially in an instance like C.K.’s, where he abused his power and committed acts of sexual harassment but didn’t necessarily do something that crosses the threshold of what we consider monstrously depraved, like, I don’t know, abuse children? If there is a line—and my God, good luck trying to definitively draw one—between what might one day be forgivable as errors of judgment or selfish thoughtlessness and crimes against humanity that can never be forgiven, then C.K., to me, falls on the former side of that line. Has anyone ever returned from “cancellation” in a way that appeases people who want justice for their actions? In a way that feels suitably contrite, reckons fully with what they did, and begins a new and deserved chapter in their career? Perhaps Aziz Ansari, who returned with an apologetic special, on Netflix, in 2019. Granted, the behavior he was accused of was much less extreme, with the allegation coming from only one person, but he has managed to claw back respectability in a smoother way than C.K. has.
In a case like C.K.’s, the road back to acceptance is perhaps impossible to fully pave. But there are things C.K. could have done to enact a better redemption, and didn’t. The problem isn’t so much C.K.’s being on television now, nine years after his disgrace. He was always going to return: He is simply too profitable and too famous to be put out to pasture. The problem is what he has been doing in the interim. His first performance post-cancellation came within less than a year, and it wasn’t long before he was doing surprisingly hacky routines about his love of the R-word, his skepticism of the Parkland teens, and the alleged differences in penis size among races. In the time since then, C.K. has self-released four specials, one of which was called Sorry and saw him performing in front of the word in giant letters, but without referencing any of his misconduct in the set itself. He’s been performing live all this time, and this Netflix special is a filmed set that he’s been touring for the past year. I wonder how people would feel about it had he genuinely gone quiet, taken the “long time” he proposed in his initial statement about the accusations to step back and listen.
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Louis C.K. Is Back With His First Major Stand-Up Special Since #MeToo. He Hasn’t Really Changed.
On one level, it’s easy to see why. C.K. has said that his #MeToo moment and subsequent cancellations of TV shows, a movie, and other engagements cost him $35 million. So there is, of course, a pretty powerful profit motive for C.K. to get back on the horse. He’s a career comedian. He loves what he does, and he wanted keep doing it. But it would have been the smarter move, at several points, to think less about what he wanted, and more about what others might accept from him. (Here, too, Ansari took a different path, moving behind the camera for a third season of his show that ceded the spotlight to co-star Lena Waithe.) And the bleak truth is that plenty of people must now be ready to sweep C.K.’s conduct under the rug along with much of the #MeToo revelations, if Netflix is willing to bring him back to a mass audience. This is the era of the manosphere, after all, and 2017 seems a long, long time ago, in mostly negative ways.
Back in 2018, Slate’s Christina Cauterucci wrote about what we might be able to glean about the future of canceled comedians after C.K. returned to standup just nine months after the women he harassed spoke out. In it, she wrote her prediction: “Every time C.K. or one of his canceled peers reemerges, some people will get mad, but most people won’t, and there will be other, more pressing outrages to smother with energy, and before anyone fully grasps what’s going on, they’ll be back on tour, or rolling through the credits of our TV shows and movies, with an ugly entry on their Wikipedia pages but a growing bank account to soothe that indignity.” How prescient this has proved.
