Louis C.K. Is Stuck in the Past - The AtlanticRidiculous, lacks the honesty of his best work." data-next-head=""/>Ridiculous, lacks the honesty of his best work." data-next-head=""/>Ridiculous, lacks the honesty of his best work." data-next-head=""/>

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Nearly halfway through his latest special, Ridiculous, Louis C.K. asks his audience to help out with a joke. When he announces “I’m so old!,” the crowd is meant to respond in unison, “How old are you?” Another comedian might answer with an exaggerated zinger. Instead, C.K. deadpans a series of grim realities about aging that are funny by way of being uncomfortably candid. How old is C.K.? “I am so old that I live in the present for the first time,” he answers, “not from wisdom or courage but from fear, because there’s too much of the past and not enough of the future.”<br>C.K.’s well-honed, self-deprecating style ties together much of the material in Ridiculous, which interweaves coarse throwaway bits about provocative subject matter—child molestation, the Holocaust, and AIDS (the latter is mentioned several times)—with observational humor from his own life, such as relocating his father to a nursing home. It’s a recognizable mixture of ideas that he’s riffed on for multiple decades, conveyed as a monologue that feels familiar for those acquainted with C.K.’s comedy.<br>What makes Ridiculous notable is that it’s his first special released on Netflix since the company publicly cut ties with him in the fall of 2017, after The New York Times published allegations from five women who reported unwanted sexual attention from the comedian. (“The hardest regret to live with is what you’ve done to hurt someone else,” C.K. said in a statement about the allegations. “And I can hardly wrap my head around the scope of hurt I brought on them.”) In the interim eight and a half years, C.K. has not so much staged a big comeback as he has quietly reclaimed a smaller portion of the enormous spotlight he once held. He’s continued to regularly perform live stand-up—both at drop-ins at the Comedy Cellar and at much larger venues such as Madison Square Garden—and pursued non-comedy projects including an audio series of conversations with his former girlfriend Blanche Gardin and Ingram, a picaresque novel published last year about a farm boy enduring interminable hardship, seemingly inspired by the works of Mark Twain and Flannery O’Connor.<br>C.K.’s career is more or less back on track, even if some people still put an asterisk beside his name. So I wasn’t exactly surprised that he doesn’t mention the nearly decade-old allegations in the new special. But the elision makes certain portions of Ridiculous tough to buy, such as when C.K. cracks about his dating life that “nobody gets to 58 single without a horrible fuckin’ life.” There’s some abstract truth in that statement, sure, but it’s missing some pretty crucial context—and although the audience may know what he’s leaving out, the joke ends up unsatisfyingly hollow, as does much of the special.<br>In April 2020, C.K. self-released a filmed stand-up special, Sincerely Louis C.K.—his first since the Times investigation—without advance notice. At the top of the show, which eventually won a Grammy for Best Comedy Album, the comic cheekily addressed the allegations: “How was your last couple of years? Anybody else get in global amounts of trouble?”<br>Toward the end, he offered some humorous “advice”: “If you ever ask somebody ‘May I jerk off in front of you?’ and they say, ‘Yes,’ just say, ‘Are you sure?’ That’s the first part. And then if they say yes, just don’t fuckin’ do it.” He proceeded to bemoan the fact that everyone knows about his kink before underlining the importance of frequent communication during sex. (“To assume that she likes it is like if they heard slaves singing in the fields and you’re like, Hey, they’re having a great time out there!”) C.K.’s prevaricating, hesitant delivery of these jokes complicated any hard-line interpretations of his real feelings. He didn’t sound completely penitent, but he certainly seemed uncomfortable talking about what happened, even when he leaned into being a stinker. Nevertheless, it was a far cry from, say, the way Aziz Ansari talked about facing an accusation of being sexually aggressive during a date with a younger woman—with remorse, and no wise cracks—in his 2019 special, Aziz Ansari: Right Now. C.K.’s follow-up special, Sorry/Not Sorry, also didn’t contain an explicit apology, making the title a glib meta joke.<br>Read: Sorry/Not Sorry and the paradox of Louis C.K.<br>Anyone hoping for a look inside C.K.’s head might have been more intrigued by his fourth feature film, 2022’s Fourth of July. The film is about Jeff, a recovering alcoholic jazz pianist struggling to confront his dysfunctional family about the emotional abuse he suffered as a child. Self-financed by C.K. and co-written with the comedian Joe List (who also stars as Jeff), Fourth of July isn’t especially...