Late to the party as ever, I am currently cultivating a minor obsession with the comedian Louis CK. Even describing him as a comedian feels unfairly restricting. His stand-up specials—Chewed Up, Live at the Beacon Theatre, Oh My God—are meticulously crafted dramatic monologues that just happen to be raucously funny, not unlike the work of Stewart Lee (though in a very different register: CK plays with and subverts an Ordinary Joe persona that makes his most poisonous gags obscurely palatable).
He is the star, writer, director and editor of his own FX sitcom, Louie, which is three series old and getting ready for a fourth. His vision is absolute. And the tone of that series is also too amorphous and perplexing to fit under the catch-all heading of comedy. Two episodes I saw recently, one with Chloe Sevigny as a book-shop assistant who is creepily over-enthusiastic in her efforts to help Louie (Louis CK) track down an old flame, and a double-episode in which David Lynch plays a coach preparing Louie to be a possible replacement for talk-show host David Letterman, wandered so far into the comedy of silence, tension and general unpleasantness that it was possible at times to forget one was watching a comedy at all. There were enough skew-whiff line readings and quizzical top-notes to act as reminders of the genre to which the show nominally belonged, but only just.
Film being my primary area of interest, I am excited to see if he will make his mark cinematically. You can’t watch Louie and not feel that he has a great, dangerous movie in him. He’s dabbled: he co-wrote two screenplays with Chris Rock (Down to Earth and I Think I Love My Wife) and is credited as writer-director of another Rock comedy, Pootie Tang. He has had small roles in films, some good (Role Models), others less so (The Invention of Lying), and recently starred in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine as the man whom Jasmine’s sister (Sally Hawkins) picks up at a party.
My feeling is that no one who exerts such control over his own appearances (and works so hard at disguising the precise calibrations in his apparently off-the-cuff stand-up routines) is going to grab the first leading role that comes along. Sure enough, he was unreceptive to the idea of playing the male lead in the new (and rather wonderful) romantic comedy Enough Said, which opens today. “I wrote it with Louis CK in mind,” said the film’s writer-director, Nicole Holofcener. “CK wouldn’t give me the time of day, thank goodness.” (That “thank goodness” is to acknowledge rightly the brilliance of her second choice, the late James Gandolfini.)
Appearing in Enough Said might have been disastrous for CK. It is a rich and delicious part, but it is also entirely sympathetic. For him to play such a character would be the equivalent of Tom Hanks being cast as a cannibalistic child-killer who doesn’t believe in climate change. It would go so violently against the grain of the persona he has spent his career constructing as to amount to career suicide. Sure, we like Louis CK while we are watching him, even when he is in the flow of his most depraved and sexually taboo monologues. But if we were to cease scrutinising the disparity between his repugnant material and his prosaic persona, the comedy might lose one of its choicest elements. What I’m saying is that I love Louis CK and I like Enough Said very much, but they would not have been a happy fit. A part in David O Russell’s forthcoming crime drama American Hustle seems much more his bag. And a movie that CK crafts for himself is an even more tantalising prospect. I’ll happily kill time re-watching Louie or his stand-up routines while I wait for that.
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