Only a few years ago, Louis CK reached a level of superstardom that few stand-up comics even approach. His avant-garde sitcom Louie was amassing a stockpile of Emmys while his self-released special, Live at the Beacon, and self-promoted tour were altering the traditional models of distribution. It was also around this time that his stand-up, by all measures, started to suffer. He never stopped being funny, but each hour was slightly worse than the last.
Luckily, those days appear to be behind him, and he seems to be comfortably settling back into being just an exceptionally good standup comic. At his show Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, his new material was a step up from his more recent work, if still not a match with his most brilliant hours, 2007’s Shameless and 2008’s Chewed Up.
A joke about the ludicrousness of deciding to become a public school teacher had the rhythms of a classic CK routine – a relatable topic told through bitterness. He’s not sympathetic to the plight of the teacher, he’s angry with her for her poor life decision. “You know what it is before you take the job,” he says, bewildered. “What we need you do is make children know math. ‘Do they want to know math?’ They don’t want to know it. You need to make them know it against their will.”
Another bit about Achilles and his mother’s mistake during the trip to the river Styx is smart and sharp, but suffers, as do several of his other jokes, from long “act outs” and tangents which end up feeling like filler. He still enjoys playing with touchy subjects – a section about abortion is cleverly sympathetic to both sides, while his defense of stereotypical racist voices is just an excuse for him to do poor impressions.
As always, the personal material is the best. Talking about ageing has become a staple of the show, so when he declares that “a nap is like you get to kill yourself and then take it back”, it fits clearly into the CK narrative. It naturally flows into stories about embarrassing moments, including a story about walking around with his fly open that veered perilously close to some of the more incendiary rumors floating around about him.
Later, his stuff on relationships serves as a reminder that some of his earliest brilliance was about his marriage and divorce. As ever, he approaches these subjects with a grin and a shrug; he insists that all relationships are doomed, but that this in itself is not a bad thing. A sweet story about the lie that brought together his Mexican grandmother and Hungarian grandfather fits neatly into that wryly cynical but accepting worldview.
After 30 years and a brief stint at the peak of the standup world, CK is well suited to an elder statesman position, and he’s embracing it. Gone are his black T-shirt and jeans; now he performs in a suit and tie. He’s no longer bringing contemporaries like Todd Barry and Tom Papa to open for him; his three support acts – Joe Machi, Michelle Wolf and Joe List – are all exciting up-and-comers who he can help move up the ladder. His days of non-stop innovation may be in the past, but fans can hopefully look forward to a long, steady career from a true master.
