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"FacebookPinterest\n\n In the will-call line at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, I got into a conversation with two guys who were nearly indistinguishable from each other, both very pale and sober-looking beneath their baseball caps and giant black-framed glasses. They told me they see every comic who comes through town. The marquee announced that Gallagher would be performing the following month, so I asked, \"Even Gallagher?\" and made a not-so-funny remark about the unimaginable number of watermelons that guy must have smashed in the past thirty-plus years. Yes, they said, they would be seeing Gallagher, and then they set me straight on how hard it is to get up and do an hour of comedy and how Gallagher tours all the time and still makes crowds laugh, \"and not just with the gigantic mallet.\" They'd both grown up in Boston and had been going to clubs their entire adult lives. There were so many comics they saw before anybody else knew their names, Denis Leary and Sam Kinison and Steven Wright and Bobcat Goldthwait...\n\n I told them I was writing a story about Louis C.K., and they described the first time they saw him, when he was \"still a teenager doing a bunch of weird experimental stuff.\" \"He's better now,\" the slightly less morose of the two said, and this then led to a ritual listing, delivered in the flattest affect imaginable, of the various bits they admired most. If you've paid any attention to Louis C.K. in the past several years you can probably re-create that list with 100 percent accuracy: \"Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy,\" \"Suck a Bag of Dicks,\" \"The Saddest Hand Job in America.\" If, on the other hand, these don't mean anything to you, it's worth taking a quick YouTube tour of his greatest hits. (Probably NSFW, unless you work in some sort of clinic devoted to the intensive study of masturbation.) The next thing they told me I already knew, because I'd been reading a lot about C.K. recently and had spent some time talking with him, but these guys spoke with such gravity that it's only right to quote them: \"He's not going to do any of those jokes tonight,\" the more morose guy said. \"Won't ever do them again.\"\n\n \"Never repeats material,\" the other one added. He very much wanted me to understand that there are guys out there struggling week after week, month after month, to get ten or fifteen good minutes, whereas Louis C.K. is taking stuff that other comics only dream of and throwing it away. Every year, a whole new act. Ninety minutes. \"Think about that.\"\n\n I promised them I would, and we parted ways. Inside the theater, the audience was very pumped to see C.K. He grew up in Newton, a suburb of Boston, so there was a strong homecoming vibe in the air. People were shouting and chanting, and the place erupted when he came out and took the mike. He doesn't really do any of the typical chummy comic patter; as Marc Maron, who came up with C.K. in the '80s, told me, \"This is a guy who, when we were younger, refused to talk to the audience. He was very much about just doing his jokes.\" C.K. (it's a homonym of Szekely, the surname of his Mexican-Hungarian father, who moved out when Louis was 10) is a big guy, six one or two, and barrel-chested, and he carries himself even bigger, with his shoulders back and chin up, all of which, along with the sharp nose and rust-colored goatee, gives him the look of a berserker when he stalks onstage. This is worth noting only because a decent amount of his material seems to emerge from a place of anger\u2014or maybe more accurately, anger's parent streams, fear and shame\u2014and when he's standing there in his black T-shirt and jeans, sweating and red-faced, you get the sense that however much that joke has been honed for comic effect, it also isn't totally an act. The signal seems to be beaming from someplace real and not completely peaceful inside him.\n\n C.K. took the stage in Boston and looked out over the audience, \"So you're all from Brookline and Braintree and shit?\" and when some guy down in front shouted, \"Quincy!\" he turned on him instantly. \"I don't give a shit where you're from,\" he said, and then proceeded to explain that he was here to do this act that people have paid money to see, and he doesn't understand why anyone would yell during it and interrupt him. \"Why wouldn't you want it to go well?\" he asked. \"Because you're 20, that's why. You're fucking 20 and you don't know anything, you piece of shit.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n However premeditated that moment might have been to establish a sense of control in the room and a useful, funny antipathy with the crowd, it was also a function of the real dynamics of his life. At breakfast the previous morning, I'd said something about the things that happen to you once you have kids\u2014that not only do you lose your ability to relate to people without children, but now you walk around all the time with the disconcerting and irreconcilable feeling that your own kids have simultaneously saved and destroyed your life\u2014and how his comedy explores that confusion in a way I found comforting and even sort of therapeutic.\n\n \"For me, it's more of an age thing than it is about having kids,\" he said. \"I don't have a lot to say to people who are younger.\" He's 43 years old and got divorced a couple of years ago from the painter Alix Bailey, with whom he now shares custody of their two girls. \"When I was first divorced, I started dating younger women, and it was really exciting. But after a while I was like, This is just dumb. You date someone younger and it's...limited. There's no future in it. And as far as just going out and getting laid, that kinda got tired for me very quickly. It's just\u2014it's very intimate. You're letting her right into the middle of your life. You see someone and you're like, She's really hot, I want to be naked with her. And then you're naked with her and you're like, Jesus, she's in my fucking room and we're naked. The idea of that\u2014of just fucking somebody\u2014became silly to me.\"\n\n He talked for a while about how diffcult the first year after his divorce was and how it affected his work. \"For one, I couldn't really talk about my wife anymore. Not that I was ever really talking about her, exactly, but now I couldn't do that at all; I couldn't talk about the woman I was divorced from. She deserves her privacy. But that meant I had no idea where I was going to get material. It was like, 'Oh, shit, there goes my act.' \" He didn't really go into why his marriage ended, except to say that they hadn't been making each other happy for a while and finally had to admit it was done. \"I just sat in my pajamas for like two years,\" he said. \"And I was nothing for my kids. And then eventually I climbed out of it and was just like, 'I can't do this. I can't fuck around like this.' I focused on the kids, and they saved my life. I thought, 'Everything's based on them now.' \"\n\n It's dumb to speculate on why anyone's relationship falls apart\u2014what seem like the obvious factors aren't always the truest ones\u2014but you wonder what it must have been like to be married to a guy who makes his living doing jokes about his wife's disdain at giving him a hand job or his daughter's vaginal rashes or, more broadly, to someone who's just so compulsively driven to talk about our darkest impulses. \"It's a positive thing to talk about terrible things and make people laugh about them,\" he said during one of our conversations. \"The problem is, the more famous you get, the more people see you who didn't choose to. And that's when you start pissing people off.\" This led to a discussion about the one joke that he worried was too much\u2014a bit about how, if we were all \"somehow okay with kid-fucking,\" pedophiles wouldn't kill kids after they raped them. \"It's a hard thing to hear,\" he said. \"But it's true. If we were less hating of kid-fucking, less kids would die. That's true. I don't know what to do with that information. But it's true.\"\n\n There's not even a joke there, I don't think. And yet I found myself laughing\u2014not so much at the shock of it as the way he was taking the \"Aren't humans dopes?\" aspect of so many comic bits and applying it to the grimmest act imaginable. There's a deep anti\u2013moral-hypocrisy vein running through C.K.'s work, which is organized as much as anything around the idea that to not speak openly about our capacity for ugliness is to further enable it. This, I think, is part of what other comics are talking about when they describe him as being \"brave\" and \"fearless\" onstage. Or it's this combined with what we know about his life, that he has two young daughters, and\u2014when he's not traveling for a gig or shooting his show or going on the radio, as he did a few months back, to ask Donald Rumsfeld over the phone if he was a lizard who eats Mexican babies\u2014he's making the girls breakfast and taking them to school and otherwise operating in full domestic-dad mode. It's something about the completely permeable membrane between those two versions of himself, the loving dad and the guy whose life appears to be an ongoing piece of performance art devoted to expressing every twisted thought that surfaces in his brain, that makes him either the most honest comedian in the world or kind of a disturbing freak. (As one comic who's worked with C.K. said to me, \"I like Louis. And I appreciate his brilliance. But the idea that he's expressing thoughts that we all think doesn't seem totally right to me. I don't actually think those things.\")\n\n A lot of C.K.'s struggle around his divorce went into the first season of his television show, \"Louie,\" which started its second season on FX in late June. C.K. writes, directs, edits, ecutive-produces, and stars in the show, which is about a recently divorced stand-up comedian who shares custody of his two girls with his ex-wife. Much has been made about the deal that C.K. got from FX, which is basically that he gets a shoestring budget (though enough to do what he wants to do) in exchange for total creative control. There's a standards woman he'll occasionally bounce stuff off, but for the most part, what appears on television is as pure a distillation of his vision as it can possibly be. The show's appeared on all sorts of best lists, so I won't waste space here seconding those opinions, except to say that it really is unlike anything that's ever been on television, far deeper and darker and much more complex\u2014a whole different entity, really\u2014than shows like \"Seinfeld\" or \"Curb Your Enthusiasm\" or \"Roseanne.\"\n\n The final episode of the first season ends with these great, poignant couple of scenes that were a TV version of the real, pivotal moment in C.K.'s life. He goes out to meet someone but instead ends up at the EastVille Comedy Club, where they let him squeeze in a set. He bombs, and then he goes back to his apartment and sends his babysitter home, and his girls wake up in the middle of the night asking for breakfast. Rather than sending them back to bed, he takes them out to the local diner, and the final shot, from outside the diner, is of him and his girls inside eating pancakes. It's a moment that could have been handled so badly, been either too comically arch or too sentimental, but instead what you feel, watching it, is that it's created by a guy with a much deeper and subtler artistic vision than he has received credit for, despite all the praise that's been heaped on the show.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n When I contacted Patton Oswalt's publicist to ask if he might have a few minutes to talk to me, she said that Patton was getting on a plane at that very moment, but yes, he would of course talk about Louis. Moments later he was on the phone, as a flight attendant in the background urged passengers to take their seats and turn off their electronic devices. \"There are a lot of comedians who have the same potential, talentwise, that Louis has,\" Oswalt said. \"But very few have the level of commitment he does.\" He elaborated that even though C.K. is now genuinely famous and people are constantly asking him to write for and/or act in their movies, he has never abandoned stand-up; he's always working on his act, and this ruthless approach to his work is what's separated him from other comedians. \"Louis's effect on stand-up reminds me of what happened when Jimi Hendrix went over to London,\" Oswalt said. \"Everybody used to fight about who was the best guitarist, who was number one. Then Hendrix came along, and everyone was like, Okay, we can all relax and talk about who's number two now.\"\n\n I said it was a little surprising to me, given that the world of comedy isn't known for its modest egos, how many comedians talk about C.K. in these terms. \"Look, I have a massive ego,\" Oswalt said, \"but at the same time, I'm a fan of comedy. It must be what it felt like to be around in the late '70s watching Richard Pryor. You want to be a great comedian, but you also feel lucky to witness this kind of transcendence.\"\n\n According to Marc Maron, that moment of transcendence was forged first when C.K. had kids and then evolved and deepened when his marriage started to fall apart. \"You're looking at a guy who was fundamentally an absurdist for the first half of his career,\" Maron told me, \"but then the pressures of his life demanded that he talk about them, and it's that integration that created a truly unique voice that can't be duplicated.\" It wasn't that C.K. was suddenly talking about stuff that was thematically radical, Maron said; it was the mixture of subject matter and sensibility that was new. \"This is an established comedic archetype\u2014the angry husband or the father that doesn't have time for himself anymore,\" he said. \"But Louis is a poet, and he was applying his incredible imagination to something that was very relatable to people.\"\n\n Maron hosts a podcast called \"WTF,\" on which C.K. appeared last October to talk about comedy and his TV show but also, amazingly, to hash out why their friendship came to an end and to try to locate the source of their mutual resentment. It's a remarkable couple of hours. At one point, C.K. tells a story about being broke and going into a music store and, for reasons that he doesn't understand, purchasing a $1,400 trumpet that he doesn't know how to play and can't afford. He leaves the store, and he's carrying around this beautiful trumpet, and he's feeling terrible about himself and his career, and eventually he goes into a peep show in Times Square. \"It's pathetic,\" he said, \"but I watched this Latvian girl, and I jerked off and came on the trumpet case. And then I realized that if I'd just gone there first, I'd still have fourteen hundred bucks.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Back in September, he referred to Sarah Palin as a cunt-face jazzy wondergirl. Or more accurately, he sent the following message to her via Twitter: \"@SarahPalinUSA kudos to your dirty hole, you fucking jackoff cunt-face jazzy wondergirl.\" This was the seventh in a string of tweets that he'd kicked off about an hour earlier with this: \"I'm on a plane to LA where I'm doing the tonight show friday. I'm kindof hammered on rum n cokes. bad idea.\" There were some other Palin-centric tweets, arguably more offensive even than the above, and some nonsense about the Beatles and Jews, and then things eventually wound down with: \"my head hurts. The turbulence on this flight is nasty. uuuuuugh. I hate the letter H. I ate it. I'm very tired. Verrry.\"\n\n A couple of nights later, when he appeared on \"The Tonight Show,\" C.K. was seated next to Bristol Palin, and near the end of the show she invited him to dance with her and her then partner from \"Dancing with the Stars.\" \"I had no idea until I arrived that her fucking daughter was on the show,\" he told me over breakfast. \"She seemed so nervous to me, and after her segment I told her, 'You did a good job. That's not easy.' And she said, 'Thank you.' And then she invited me to dance. And I knew I was paying some kind of penance for what I'd done. I'm standing there\u2014me, Bristol Palin, Jay Leno, and the 'Dancing with the Stars' dude\"\u2014his face took on the Platonic expression of unhappiness\u2014\"and I'm like, This is totally karma. Pretty direct karma.\"\n\n I asked if he regretted saying that stuff about a woman, even if it was Sarah Palin. \"God, what a mess. I really shouldn't have done that. I regret it a lot. I wish I hadn't done that.\"\n\n I agreed that those were some dark things to say, and he was like, No, no, no, no, you don't understand. It wasn't the nature of the tweets that he regretted. \"I'm not a political comedian,\" he said. \"That's just not what I do.\" It was a point of pride for him that he had credibility with the right wing, that Andrew Breitbart, for instance, has complimented C.K. on his website. \"But then after I did this, someone wrote this real angry thing on his site about how I'm just another gatekeeper of Obama. And the thing that really hurt was that they paired the tweets with this thing they dug up that I'd said on \"The Opie &amp;amp; Anthony Show.\" And that show, the stuff you say\u2014it's just straight from the most bottom part of your mind.\"\n\n I hadn't heard the stuff he'd said on the radio show about Palin, and when I asked him about it, he waved his hand in front of his face like it was probably best just to let it lie. But then the strength of her awfulness proved too powerful for him. \"You know what it is? Honestly, I think she's a shit mother, I really do. I'm saying that as a parent. I think she's a horrible parent. To parade around with that Down-syndrome baby, to hold him up in front of the fucking Republican National Convention, it's just gross. I don't mean the kid's gross, it's just a gross thing to do. It's exploitative.\"\n\n The thing he'd said on the radio was that if the baby was less than a year old, it wasn't a challenge yet, even if he had Down syndrome. Not long after that, C.K. got an e-mail from a listener who was the father of a Down's child. \"The guy told me I was full of shit,\" he said, \"because having Down's comes with all this medical baggage, and it ruined his and his wife's entire life, and he said, basically, If you don't think it's a challenge, you're a fucking liar. That broke my heart. It was very respectful. He never insulted me; he just said how wrong I was.\"\n\n He gets a lot of angry e-mail, he said, and he never replies. But this guy had sent pictures of his kid, and he felt terrible that he'd put him through any more strife than he'd already been subjected to. \"So I wrote him back and just said, 'What you wrote, it's part of me now. And your kid's very lucky to have you as a dad.' \"\n\n We sat there suspended for a moment in earnestness, looking at each other over the table like, Life, huh? It's just a bunch of relentless punches to the junk. And then he added: \"All that other shit, though, saying Palin had a Chinese family in her vagina and whatever, I don't regret that. It's comedy. I have said many indefensible things onstage. It's fucking comedy. Plus, I do believe if she got elected, she'd really Hitler up the place.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n I walked over to the corner of 39th Street and Tenth Avenue in Manhattan one day this spring to watch him shooting a scene for the new season. It's a truly terrible spot, right near the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, with truck after giant diesel-spewing truck shrieking by. Plus, there was construction going on across the street, and the jackhammering wouldn't let up. It was also the first real hot day of spring, but the scene was supposed to take place in winter, so C.K. was wearing this heavy coat and his head looked like it was being melted by a ray gun.\n\n They have a fairly skeleton crew (an assistant occasionally mopped C.K.'s head and rubbed sunblock on it), and everyone seemed in pretty excellent humor even though the clock was ticking now on getting episodes in the can. C.K. rolled his eyes in the manner of deadline-haunted writers everywhere and said, \"I still have a few episodes to write. Definitely very stressful.\" Beyond that, though, he showed no stress at all, which a couple guys on the set confirmed is how things are with him, that he's a perfectionist but never loses it or acts like a jerk to the people working for him.\n\n The scene they were shooting involved C.K. walking up to a street corner, getting ready to cross at the light, then hearing someone yelling behind him and turning around just as a homeless guy runs out into traffc and gets leveled by a truck. They had cones set up in the left lane, and a nervous cop was there, trying to keep them from edging too far out into the street. They shot the setup of C.K. arriving at the corner and the guy running past him, and then he spent a while posing a dummy dressed like a homeless man in the middle of the left lane. Then he geeked out with the cinematographer for a while\u2014\"Whaddya got there, a 32?\"\u2014and got behind the camera himself. Every once in a while someone would recognize him and call out from their car, and he'd have a conversation while they waited for the light to change. One guy in a tow truck hollered out, \"You are absolutely the funniest guy on TV!\" and then circled the block a couple of times, craning his neck out of the window over and over.\n\n The shot of the truck running over the guy was fantastic. They stopped traffc for a minute as the stunt driver, starting from a block away, picked up speed, crushing the dummy and then coming to a stop about six feet in front of where C.K. and the camera crew were set up. The cop looked like he was going to crap himself, but C.K. never flinched from behind the camera, lifting his head only when the shot was done to yell, \"Boom! Motherfucker. That is nasty!\" They'd be breaking early because it was a Wednesday, the day that his time with the kids started, and he's always there to pick them up at school. Presumably he'd be writing and editing at night after he got them to bed, then once the show was wrapped he'd start up at the clubs again a few nights a week, then back on the road come fall.\n\n The path generally works like this: Stand-up comic gets big break, and his sitcom is picked up; then, if he's lucky, he becomes rich on residuals and buys seventeen cars and never has to sit in the dingy back room of Dick's Beantown Comedy Vault or wherever again. That won't be the trajectory for C.K., for whom stand-up is not just the way he generates material for his show but is also the stabilizing force in his life. \"Every time I've needed it, stand-up has saved me,\" he said. \"When I needed money, or when I felt like shit about myself\u2014stand-up has always saved me. I'll never stop doing it.\"\n\n Back at the Wilbur Theatre, there was an older couple sitting next to me up in the mezzanine who looked like they'd stepped straight out of a Yankee Candle store. They were silent through every bit, and it was a little uncomfortable sitting next to them, like watching porn with my Aunt Jean. Late in the show, C.K. did this incredibly filthy joke about getting blown by an angel, which ended with him bent over, trying to maneuver the wings in such a way that he could complete the act. It went on for a while, and at one point, in the middle of C.K.'s simulation\u2014dealing with the sweaty balls and the cumbersome wings and the commitment to just making this imaginary guy come, so that the angel could get back to dealing with all the other shit she has to deal with\u2014the couple just exploded in uncontrollable laughter.\n\n After the show, I went backstage. He had another show to do in half an hour, and he looked totally spent, slouching into this ratty sofa, his shirt soaked through. I mentioned the couple and their stiffness and then how they lost it with that joke. \"That's good,\" he said. \"That's good to know.\" He analyzed it for a minute in that way comics do, talking about how cheap the joke is and that he didn't even want to use it but that the challenge was to \"try to get there in an interesting way.\"\n\n \"You never know how you're going to reach someone,\" he said, \"what's going on inside of them, you know? I'm glad that joke connected.\"\n\n Months later, talking to Marc Maron about C.K., I was reminded of that image of the couple and the way they spontaneously erupted together. \"We all have this festering id full of devils and weirdness,\" Maron said, \"and when we access it, voluntarily or involuntarily, it can be a frightening place, and it might make us feel ashamed of ourselves.\" Or it can be something else, a kind of liberation. That's the role that C.K. plays, Maron said. The service he provides is that he knows how to guide us into and then back out of darkness. \"Louis just goes right in there and says, 'Don't worry, I got this. I got a flashlight. I know these people.' \""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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