Honesty, Control, & Explosive Diarrhoea Why you should be watching FX’s Louie, and why everything matters, from truth to poop. Louie stands with his back to the desk. In the oak paneled office of the New York townhouse his appearance is incongruous. Like a giant, tubby, ginger bird. He is visibly perspiring. Behind him cool, as ever, Jack Dall (David Lynch) demands one final time: “Make me laugh on the count of three.” We watch with tortured fascination as Louie’s face performs emotional gymnastics while he gropes for a joke. Any joke. What follows is perhaps simultaneously the most heartbreaking, hilarious, and generally moving 30 seconds of television that exists. For half a minute, Louis CK straps your emotions to a rack and just fucking goes to town. This is the sort of standard for television we have become accustomed to over the past four or so years with ‘Louie’. He is a man who appears constantly on the verge of breaking down. Everything in his world is slightly beyond his control and understanding – the people who surround him baffle him, his relationships invariably stall in cringe worthy fashion, and kids diarrhea in his bathtub. But, he’s not just a blithering idiot because, equally, Louie is a domain over which its titular character exerts so much control. The surreal encounters all seem part of a bizarre world that exists purely within the confines of Louie’s skull.
I was recently talking with a friend who mused that the reason Louis CK’s stand up was so funny was because of its unflinching honesty. There’s definitely something to that – It’s a theme that is inherent to his TV show – shrugging and humphing his way through scenarios that are, let’s be honest, fucking bananaballs, he tackles everything with an ubiquitous air of “I guess this happening now.” Whether it’s something as absurd as watching someone else’s kid shove fistfuls of raw mince into his gob; or as profound as the woman he loves leaving abruptly and forever, you get the sense that none of it is intended to be trivial. What unites the two scenarios is that in both Louie can just vacantly shrug – Sometimes kids do come along and shit all over your bathroom. Which is ok, because these are just things that happen. Except, sometimes, they are not. Sometimes Louis lets us glimpse something more visceral. The form that took at the climax of Season 3 was a chubby middle-aged dude in an oak paneled office, tearfully attempting to keep his life together while an impatient audience asks for the last time “make me laugh.” There is no smoke, there are no mirrors, and there is to be no deus ex. There is only Louie. I guess there is some form of honesty there. That is why ‘Louie’ is so good. No- that is why Louie is so important.
