The Crime of Comedy
Louis C.K.'s Fourth of July
Released in select theaters last week, Louis C.K.’s film Fourth of July is his first feature since 2017, when, at the height of the #MeToo movement, The New York Times revealed that he’d sexually harassed at least five women over the years, most of them fellow comedians. American celebrity culture feeds on stories of impossible ascents and epic falls. To kill a king is even more pleasurable than to anoint one. In the days after the scandal broke, critics who’d previously hailed C.K. as a master savaged him with equal fervor. After admitting to the accusations publicly, he went into self-imposed exile in Europe and didn’t record a special for two years.
As Pauline Kael observed, Woody Allen was the first comedian…
…to use his awareness of his own sexual insecurities as the basis for his humor, and when he turned psychodrama into comedy he seemed to speak—to joke—for all of us.
C.K. derives his style from Allen (a comparison that, given Allen’s own accusations, must damn C.K. even more in the eyes of his detractors). To this neurotic pose, he bakes in Richard Pryor’s gift for personification and mimicry, along with George Carlin’s acerbic social commentary and ersatz existentialism. C.K. presents his comedy as a prurient examination of the dark side of the psyche. In the cloistered club, he provides a space (like all comics) to check the superego at the door and let the id run wild. In this way, a comic provides a salutary function: a mental release valve for society.
Such alchemy hits a nerve and draws you in. He takes what’s familiar in life and estranges it, so that we see it—and ourselves—as absurd. When he gets you laughing at taboo subjects—Auschwitz, dead babies, the word retarded—his cocked brow and demented grin let you know that he sees through your facade. With impish devilry, he draws lines, crosses them, and doubles down just when you can’t take anymore. To condemn him, then, is to fall into the very self-righteousness that comics—like jesters—exist to reveal. When critics respond to Louis C.K. with indignation, they protest too much. Five minutes ago, they were laughing, too.
So what about his latest material? Here we can speak without reservation. Fourth of July has all the qualities of a freshmen film-making final project—and that’s not a compliment. C.K. wrote it with Joe List, his lead actor, who plays Jeff, a nervous, recovering alcoholic jazz pianist in New York. Like an Allen protagonist, Jeff wears his anxieties on his sleeve. We first meet him in therapy, where his shrink (played by C.K.) attempts to help him cope with family baggage. Meanwhile, he accidentally sees the private texts of his wife (Sarah Tollemache), and when he confronts her about it, she confesses that she’s unhappy they’ve never had kids.
This announcement throws Jeff, and impels him to attend an Independence Day family gathering in Maine in order to exorcize his inner demons. List has a naturalistic, sheepish quality that endears, and he and Tollemache (his actual spouse) have chemistry. But as soon as the film introduces his kin, it craters. The film renders Jeff’s family as the most caricatured Boston Irish trash imaginable. Tough-as-nails Mom (Paula Plum) is preposterously caustic, while Dad (Robert Walsh) is so emotionally stunted as to hardly speak. Meanwhile, as Jeff’s extended relatives, Nick Di Paolo, Richard O’Rourke, Chris Walsh, and Dorothy Dwyer are engaged in a contest for the stupidest performance.
C.K. also throws in Naomi (Tara Pachecho), a black friend of Jeff’s cousin, who decides to bring her to the reunion. Just what makes for Naomi’s dramatic function escapes you, along with why any black woman would attend—let alone endure—a gathering of such comically crass bigots. But then few of the characters make any sense. The dialogue is blunt and crude, the conflicts broad and basic, a psychological drama that feels set inside a Bud Lite commercial. At long last, Jeff overcomes his repression and explodes on his family, magically liberating him.
When C.K. sticks to his trademark scatological humor, it makes for better bits. When he tries for melodrama, it’s painful. These saccharine moments are outdone only by his half-hearted stabs at expressionism. I’m not sure what he was going for, but it bombs. You wish he’d kept Jeff in the therapy scenes—maybe the two of them could’ve worked out their issues with more cleverness. You paid for his cynicism, not his syrup.
The response by reviewers to C.K.’s 2017 scandal was telling. For some, his actions altered not only their opinion of his morality, but also his comedy. Commentators—often from the same liberal outlets that had knighted him—piled on about his politically incorrect content. Others read biographical details into his material, summoning their inner Puritan to signal their virtue and denounce his masturbation jokes. Variety’s Sonia Saraiya said she felt betrayed on a personal level. Jesse David Fox, of Vulture, labeled C.K.’s performances selfish and dishonest.
For most of C.K.’s career, the ‘real’ Louis C.K.—a genuinely good guy troubled by demons but with a compassionate and decent core—has functioned as an authorizing alibi of sorts for the special’s boundary-violating experiments.
Thus opined Lili Loofburrow in Slate in 2021, analyzing how Louis the man and Louis the persona interact. (Slate once had an episode-by-episode discussion club of the FX show Louis, which was taken offline after C.K’s cancellation and only made available again on C.K.’s website, in the past few weeks.)
By their moralistic harangues, these critics only prove one of C.K.’s motifs: that deep down, we’re all hypocrites and perverts. A critic’s job is to judge the artwork—not the artist. If art is to be the province of saints, then prepare for a world without movies, music, dance, and just about every creative form. Some may respond that they don’t demand holiness, just common decency and professionalism. Agreed. But we can’t let this reasonable standard impel us to defenestrate artists and their creations who don’t measure up to the latest rules. Do liberals really want a return to the Hays Code?
As for this business about honesty, we don’t go to the theater or any art form to see a “real” person. A person in real life is dull, like a potted plant. We go to see performers, ones who give us truth, which is—paradoxically—the product of artifice. The greatest performers are like magicians: they deceive us. And we willingly suspend our disbelief. It’s the hacks who can’t hide their technique that we hate. In sport, in art, in letters, we want the pros who make it look effortless—so good that, like Federer, it’s zen.
That’s what C.K., at his height, achieved. Like a method actor, he honed his craft such that he seemed to lose himself in the role. Watching his self-interrogations laced with loathing, you couldn’t distinguish the persona from the performer. Like Dylan or Joni Mitchell, it seemed he wasn’t acting—that he spoke right from life. But to take in a disclosive memoir or album or stand-up routine and believe it’s factually accurate is a category error. All art, all biography, all auto-biography, is a construction. This holds even when it strikes a confessional tone—especially when it does so.
Eugene O’Neill drew on his family of origin to pen Long Day’s Journey into Night, the greatest American play. But the Tyrones are fictive—his actual kin were more complicated. That’s why it’s a mistake to critique art purely in terms of an artist’s life or context. These inform the work, for sure, and certainly everything an artist creates goes through the self-same psyche. Artists often work out their issues on canvas (which makes them bold, not selfish). We can certainly engage in psychological criticism. But artworks also exist in a realm outside the creator: they inhabit a world of meaning that goes beyond their authors’ intentions. Structuralist Northrop Frye, for instance, analyzed the whole of Western literature without reference to the specific lives of writers.
To say ‘X is a gifted writer, but he is a political enemy and I shall do my best to silence him’ is harmless enough…The deadly sin is to say ‘X is a political enemy: therefore he is a bad writer.’ George Orwell
Louis C.K. is a gifted comedian. Some may decide that his indiscretions now make it impossible to watch him. That’s their prerogative. Would they reach the same conclusion about the pop of Michael Jackson who committed far graver abuse? Perhaps. The paintings of Caravaggio, who murdered a man?
Whatever our personal feelings, we can’t cancel artists as a society—or even their most repellent products. Some singular celluloid landmarks—The Birth of a Nation (1915), Triumph of the Will (1935)—serve repugnant ideologies. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is anti-semitic. We must know such facts. And we must continue to study these works of genius. Censorship in any form is the kiss of death.
Yeats said that art is forgiveness for sin. With respect, that’s not quite right. Art is penance. Forgiveness is something only the other can offer. Artistic wonders don’t atone for the crimes of their creators. But they do capture the human condition. At their most raw, they unmask our complicity in the corruption of that condition. Louis C.K. gets at this truth in the best moments of his comedy. As an artist, as a man, he’s redeemable. But Fourth of July isn’t.
Wow great writing and strong points made. One of your best.