Welcome to Charming or Tedious.

Sterner’s Musings On…Louis C.K.

I like the concept of standup comedy. It harkens back to the days when storytellers across the world would captivate their audiences around a campfire with tales of bravery, stupidity, and love. Standup, in all incarnations, is about the same shit, which is why I believe this form of entertainment hasn’t lost most of its audience base the way the radio or theatre has. 

With that said, I am frequently not amused by standup others deem hilarious. Whitney Cummings made me want to kill myself. Daniel Tosh is a fucking idiot. Dane Cook has some moments, but his cro magnon mug and strange harem of squealing women in every audience ruined it for me. Kevin Hart is funny, if a bit too homophobic for my tastes, and I like Sommore. I quite literally have a list of people I like which could fit onto the palm of my hand, and people I don’t like, which would stretch from Mercury all the way to the sun. It might be because I think I’m pretty fucking witty, but I’m just not that impressed with most comedians. Almost every time I watch standup (or almost any TV show or movie, for that matter), I just sort of think “I could do that, and better”.

The first time I saw Louis C.K. I was snorting coke with Rogier and Mr. Sterner, and after Rogier’s insistence “dude was hilarious”, we threw one of his shows up on Netflix and I watched with baited, twitchy breath. MAKE ME LAUGH, MOTHERFUCKER! I gave it about 15 minutes and when no LOLz were had I turned that shit off and Stefan made Rogier listen to some obscure guitarist while I sat around and stared at a wall.

With that said, I was content to chalk Louis C.K. up to another comedic failure, some asshat who talked just enough about routine daily life to make him a hit with a huge demographic. Lucky him. And then…people started quoting him around me, and it was funny. And then…I started seeing screenshots with captions from his shows, and they were funny. And then…I started thinking maybe I should try again, why the hell not? And so…I did.

I watched the “Shameless” show, which I found again to be not particularly amusing. The comments about his (then) wife weirded me out (thank GOD they divorced, I mean really) and none of his material was particularly witty or worth listening to. But I decided to forge on, so I watched SIX (count ‘em!) episodes of the first season of Louie, and again, I wasn’t impressed. Like dude, I know. Life is mundane and depressing. Middle age is weird. Being married is stupid, and being single is even stupider. Being a parent is the stupidest thing of all but at least it gives you purpose. Other parents are assholes. Yadda yadda yadda. The show is BLEAK, shadowed by the show’s opening vignette and cover.

I mean, seriously! Clouds! A man with his head in his hands! How much bleaker can it get?!

But then I watched “Hilarious”. The first half bored me, as it was full of the usual “oh now I’m single again, it’s so hard/weird to be single at 40something”, but the second half was fantastic. His observations on people’s voices, how we whine about our amazing lives, the “ME” generation…it was flawless! I’m not going to say it was brilliant, or even actually hilarious, but it was pretty good. And that’s my final rating on this dude: pretty good.

Viva la angry redheads.

This motherfucker’s shit is available widely on Netflix.