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" Season 3, Episode 7: &amp;quot;Ikea/Piano Lesson&amp;quot; We talked to comedian and frequent Louie guest star Jim Norton about Thursday night&amp;#039;s episode of the show. He hadn&amp;#039;t actually seen it, but we still talked to him. Ikea horror stories included. Part of a regular series. ESQUIRE.COM: Hi. It&amp;#039;s Anna. How are you? JIM NORTON: I am... Hold on one second. I&amp;#039;m just... ESQ: Yeah. Do what you need to do. [Brief pause.] JN: Hello? ESQ: Hi. JN: Okay. Sorry about that. I&amp;#039;m just swallowing some fruit. How are you doing? ESQ: What are you eating? JN: I just had some scrambled egg whites and a little bit of fresh fruit with it. ESQ: Are you on a diet? JN: You know what? My whole existence is spent just trying to not shove bad food in my fat face. It&amp;#039;s like a constant struggle. I&amp;#039;ll do really good for a while, and then I do bad, then I do really good. So right now, I&amp;#039;m doing okay. I&amp;#039;m finally back in the gym. So, I wouldn&amp;#039;t say it&amp;#039;s a diet. I&amp;#039;m just trying to not eat horrendous. ESQ: What would you eat if you were being horrendous? JN: Morton&amp;#039;s carrot cake. Or I eat Weight Watchers ice cream, but I&amp;#039;ll eat four of them. So I convince myself, Hey, you&amp;#039;re doing good. It&amp;#039;s only two points. But then I just ate eight points worth. So I&amp;#039;m just trying really hard to balance, you know. It&amp;#039;s embarrassing. And if I gotta go to the beach and be shirtless \u2014 it&amp;#039;s always been an act of humiliation. ESQ: If Louis can go on his show and go to the beach with his body, I think you can, too. JN: With Louis&amp;#039;s body, he should be embarrassed to do things with clothing on. But this is the beauty of Louis C.K.: He doesn&amp;#039;t care. I&amp;#039;m sure he doesn&amp;#039;t care about what he looks like when it comes to doing the show. And he was naked on Lucky Louie, too. It&amp;#039;s a beautiful lack of worrying. We were talking one time about how he was taking some boxing, just a little bit. He was telling me he was sparring in a gym. I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;quot;Were people there?&amp;quot; And he goes, &amp;quot;Yeah.&amp;quot; And I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;quot;But didn&amp;#039;t they look at you when you were... ?&amp;quot; And he goes, &amp;quot;Who gives a shit?&amp;quot; He really doesn&amp;#039;t care if he was doing it well and people were looking. I admire that about him, that he has the ability to zone other people out and focus on what he&amp;#039;s doing. ESQ: That&amp;#039;s probably why the show takes so many risks. JN: He&amp;#039;s going to give you his sensibility. Louis gives you what he wants to give you. He never, ever tries to serve up what he thinks you want. He wants you to enjoy it, but he&amp;#039;s not gonna change it to make other people happy. ESQ: Did you get a chance to see last night&amp;#039;s episode? JN: I didn&amp;#039;t, no. What happened? ESQ: Oh, man. A lot. He went to Ikea with a woman who he spanked last season. There&amp;#039;s something about Ikea that makes people fight, I think. Have you ever been to one? JN: I have, but it&amp;#039;s been many years. There&amp;#039;s one in New Jersey off... exit 13A? ESQ: I&amp;#039;m familiar. JN: You know the one. I went to it and... Wow. This didn&amp;#039;t happen to me. This happened to my producer. Years ago, when he was still dating his wife, they were at Ikea. His wife got into a big argument with some guy over, like, where to place your car while waiting to pick up stuff. My producer, who at the time was just an intern, almost got his teeth knocked out. I said, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t marry this girl. This girl&amp;#039;s fucking fighting with strangers. She&amp;#039;s going to get you killed.&amp;quot; ESQ: That sounds like a Louie scene. There was a reconciliation during this episode between Louis and Marc Maron that was, I believe, based on a real feud. JN: That&amp;#039;s the beauty of him. The scene I did a couple years ago with Rick Crom, where we sat and talked about the word &amp;quot;faggot&amp;quot; \u2014 Rick talked about the word as a gay man and what it meant to him. And that came from a conversation we had at the Comedy Cellar. Rick mentioned this speech about where the word came from. And Louis thought it was interesting. Then, the next thing you know, Louis calls and goes, &amp;quot;Hey, man, I got this scene I&amp;#039;d love you to do.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s how he writes stuff. ESQ: We can expect to see you this season, right? JN: I believe you can. Hopefully he didn&amp;#039;t cut me out. I never know I&amp;#039;m in the show until somebody tells me, &amp;quot;You were in the show.&amp;quot; Then I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;quot;Okay. Good.&amp;quot; I hate watching myself, so even when I&amp;#039;m on it, I specifically won&amp;#039;t watch. I would rather watch a video of myself going down on a group of men than watch myself on TV. ESQ: The scenes with you and the other comedians sitting around shooting the shit are my favorites. JN: Well, he&amp;#039;s so good. When you do a scene with Louis, you run through it a couple of times, and it feels like a scene. But he always goes off the book a little bit. As a stand-up, he can&amp;#039;t say the same thing fives times in a row without changing it. That&amp;#039;s just his comic instinct. ESQ: I wonder if he trusts stand-ups a little more. The non-comedian actors I&amp;#039;ve spoken to who&amp;#039;ve been on the show say every word is on the page. JN: I think he respects their ability to get it right. With comedians, it&amp;#039;s probably a combination of me having fucked up a couple of lines and all of a sudden I come out with something that&amp;#039;s more natural, and it works, and he&amp;#039;s like, &amp;quot;Good. Fuck it.&amp;quot; I think he&amp;#039;s had enough conversations with comedians where he knows it&amp;#039;s usually going somewhere funny or interesting. Maybe that&amp;#039;s why he&amp;#039;s more comfortable letting comics riff. I would understand that. PLUS: Read The Newsroom and Breaking Bad Recaps Here on Monday Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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