Louis C.K. Back With Hilariously Grim Fourth Season
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| Louis C.K. is delightfully dark and funny as ever in the fourth season of his eponymous hit show. |
Hence, the fourth season’s new episodes feel as fresh — and misanthropic — as ever.
“Ever wonder what happens after you die?” he says in one comedy club bit. “Actually, lots of things happen. Just none of them include you.”
Welcome back, old friend!
The first two episodes will be structurally familiar for fans of the show; the first, a pastiche of Louie’s daily life, takes on gleefully noisy early-morning garbage removal; revisits his comedians’ poker group, in which Jim Norton confesses to some unorthodox self-pleasuring methods; and advises his daughter, whose assignment from school is to “write a letter to AIDS.” (Given the comic’s recent critique of Common Core, it’s perhaps a pointed send-up of the public school curriculum.)
My kids used to love math. Now it makes them cry. Thanks standardized testing and common core!
— Louis C.K. (@louisck) April 28, 2014He also manages to throw his back out while gesturing to a vibrator in a sex shop, leading to a conversation with an apathetic doctor (Charles Grodin) that seems adapted from his older bit about how, when you’re over 40 and injured, physicians will basically tell you to “just be happy it doesn’t hurt all the time.”The second episode is a single-focus plot that seems like a stand-alone short film, a format C.K. was increasingly favoring toward the end of last season. Guest star Jerry Seinfeld gamely takes on the role of a really snotty Jerry Seinfeld, who invites Louie to open for him at a Hamptons charity event and promptly throws him under the bus.
It’s a fish-in-a-barrel set-up, showing the perennially black-T-shirted comedian bombing in front of a crowd of sequined caviar-eaters, but it may be the first time he’s portrayed himself as less than successful onstage; this is usually the one venue in which his character can count on making it work, despite the rest of his life’s shortcomings.
The rest of the episode veers wildly into a comic’s sadistic fantasy, in which one stunning blond model (Yvonne Strahovski) gets all of his jokes, tells him the rest of the billionaire crowd are a-holes and seduces him at her beachside mansion. Inevitably, this will not go smoothly. But we close — and I don’t think this is a major spoiler — on our man with both a banged-up face and a smile, which feels about right.
TV Review: ‘Louie’
Inevitably, not everything works, including some of the material devoted to Louie’s interactions with his young daughters, as he seeks to balance his standup career and parental duties. More often, though, the show is wonderfully absurd — from a handyman trying to tell Louie a filthy Pinocchio joke (and horribly botching it) to Louie discussing vibrators and masturbation with his comedy pals to, in the second half-hour, performing at a snooty Hamptons benefit to help out an equally snooty and high-handed Jerry Seinfeld. (Guest stars have never been a problem, and this season loads up on them, including Ellen Burstyn, Charles Grodin and Yvonne Strahovski.)Louie: TV Review
Louie is hard to classify other than it exists and it's immensely enjoyable most of the time and then shifts gears and becomes something you don't expect right in front of you. No show quite behaves like Louie, which exists in a 30 minute dimension that FX has essentially given to creator Louis C.K. to do with as he pleases. And if you've followed the show then you know describing it is almost always a mug's game. Tell someone it's the best comedy on television -- which it has been throughout its run -- and they could watch one episode and think you're insane because they didn't laugh or because it made them seem awkward and oddly out of sorts, like walking into one of Woody Allen's mid-career films when they were expecting something from Michael Bay.The beautiful thing about Louie is you can't reverse engineer the show and find the reason for its success. Much of that is because Louis C.K. has a singular vision and the folks at FX understood that and wanted him to find a way to unveil that for the world in a way that would work better -- a lot better -- than a similar show he tried on HBO. So they left him alone, essentially, giving him the money to make a show without interference. Send it back when you're done. That's the lore, at least, and it's damn close to the truth. Louis C.K. tapped his inspiration -- his life -- and FX nurtured it and never blinked at how audacious the whole thing might be. So we ended up with Louie, a mostly-autobiographical story about a divorced stand-up comic with two daughters, rent to pay, a weight issue, a fondness for masturbation and a seeming inability to find a stable relationship. And even that's not really a quarter of it. Being unable to describe what Louie is about is now, and hopefully forever, a part of what makes it brilliant. There's a universality to his experience. There's existential angst hiding in his humor. There's laughter in the mundane stupidity of his friends. There is some kind of head-shaking acknowledgement that life can be a real black cloud bitch sometimes, but if you don't find the humor in that bleakness then you'll never make it.
It's hard to overstate, however, how much this series is a singular vision personified. Louis C.K. is the creator, executive producer, show runner, the writer, the director, the star, the editor and also the one with the most say in the music. He is large, he contains multitudes. And yes, if "Song Of Myself" is just one of the poems that define Walt Whitman, then each randomly difficult to describe episode of Louie is just part of what makes Louis C.K. one of his generation's best chroniclers of this mortal coil.
On May 5, the fourth season returns with "Back," which is less about being back than about Louie's own back going out, and less about that than about unique male masturbation habits, letting your kids carry the burden of their own lives and also about aging. Among other things.
Is it particularly hilarious? No. But it's a wonderful 30 minutes. A week later, we get "Model," an episode that is, in fact, particularly hilarious. A week after that we get "So Did the Fat Lady," which should probably get an Emmy.
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