Louis CK arrives in Edinburgh trailing “world’s best standup” superlatives, and he’s cheered onstage at the 3,000-capacity Playhouse to the distant rafters. The show that follows has some terrific set-pieces and effortlessly exhibits CK’s skills, and his childlike glee at life’s ravages. But it’s below his best. There are fewer of those hard-bitten insights his work can yield into middle-aged, illusions-stripped-away male life, and they’re replaced here by standard-issue cynicism.
He sets the tone early. Striding on in a black suit that puts years on him, CK opens with a routine about suicide. Why, he asks in disbelief, don’t more people do it? How bad do some people’s lives have to get? Elsewhere in town, at the Edinburgh festival, his compatriot Chris Gethard deploys comedy to address his own suicidal impulses. Here, CK cackles past the pieties, recasting self-annihilation as a dynamic act of self-determination (“Yes you can!”).
The misanthropic mode now and then relents – his next gambit is about his kids’ low-rent education, and includes a choice gag laying bare exactly what a US public schoolteacher’s job involves. But a substantial middle section again defaults to nihilism, as our host explores lifelong marriage. It all starts with an event – weddings – that even your best friends hate, and gets worse from there.
CK paints a picture of a 60-year marriage between Rose and Richard that survives only because Rose accepts being called “a piece of shit” every day at breakfast. Witness Richard’s horror when, after his 10 liberated years in heaven, Rose arrives expecting a happy reunion. That’s a bleakly funny image; another comes when CK smashes his hands together so angrily to demonstrate human incompatibility that he breaks the microphone. But if joke by joke it’s strong, the worldview (“You’re either alone, or you’re in a shitty, shitty thing”) is dispiriting.
Emerging from this section, there is a promising moment when CK explains that the best thing in his life (his kids) came out of its worst decision (getting married). On that basis, he argues, why bother ever making any careful decisions? That’s the provocative, tongue-barely-in-cheek material we seek at a CK gig. But here it collapses into a weak riff on how he got his wife pregnant. Later, we’re told of CK’s obsession with the trailer for the male-stripper movie Magic Mike. It strikes a cheeringly incongruous note amid the crabbiness. But all it heralds is a riff on CK’s supposed homosexual impulses, which takes 10 minutes to establish that “I just don’t like dicks”. Good to know.
This being CK, there are beautifully constructed jokes within even this meretricious section, like his visit to the home of a purring supervillain, regaling him with exotic cognac, turtle and, er, dick. Even better is when the great gags come from more unexpected quarters, like the beautiful closer about the arbitrariness of the Christian calendar (“What year is it? It’s 3”), or the standout routine exploring children’s ingratitude through the story of Achilles’ heel. There’s material here, then, to make sense of all those “world’s best standup” claims. But it isn’t his best show.
- At SSE Arena, Wembley, on 12 August; at Hammersmith Apollo, London, on 13 and 14 August.
In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.
