I find it difficult to imagine Louis CK’s current act can persist in much the same matter it is right now, and suspect his current 15 minutes of fame (or, if you’re disposed to the view, infamy) as mocker of his disgrace status can’t sustain past the new 15 minutes… maybe he’ll evolve and evolve in smaller venues… The tension of transgression at this particular nexus gets dulled.
… maybe staying with the same drifting to smaller venues AND being happy with such AND inching his comedy either back to what’s now considered disgraced but not so much in the immediate terrain but not rubbing his controversy in the face?…
And so it is... Comments here peg the question of “They… probably didn’t want to spend so much time talking about Louis”.
Madeline: Louis. But we were talking about the stuff that’s been in the news recently, and it’s like very simple to just say, “First of all, those jokes aren’t funny, and second of all, they’re almost hate speech.” And it doesn’t feel complicated to be like, “That sucks.” […]
Why do you think certain comedians, and audience members too, are so stubborn or sort of disinterested in changing with the times with these things? It’s an opportunity for…
Pete: I completely agree. It’s how you greet change that says a lot about you as a person. And I don’t think it’s unique to comedians, a lot of people have a real need in themselves that no one should tell them what to do. I think you see that a lot in comedy. But I see it in my father and he’s an oil man, you know what I’m saying? I mean, he delivers oil, he’s not like a tycoon.Â
The oddly telling point here is the question “certain audiences… AND AUDIENCE MEMBERS TOO”… There’s a bit of a contradiction, in that they already stated “Louis is now doing his act before a different audience”, as too dissembling how his shock act is any different…
But therein lies a question. You’re Louis CK. You want to perform. Anywhere. Before an appreciative audience. What else do you do but what he’s doing? Rightly or wrongly, the audience that’s right now protesting him won’t be in the audience “appreciating” the wit and wisdom of a “reformed” Louis CK, even if they might have been before. So. You have to just go ahead and ignore them or play off of them, and proceed, until you’re stuck in Andrew Dice Clay land.
If he did an exact replica of an old HBO special, would he have an audience, as he does at this point in time with his supposedly “less empathetic” version of his old schtik?
And then we get the problem. Gatekeepers. Tut tutting the audience. For laughing. At a comedy show. A tension of  Sliding ever easy into a vantage point of viewing “art” (or whatever you want to call some entertainments) through a “Soviet Realist” paradigm and judging it as to whether and how far and how effectively it marches toward an ideological ideal.