Preface
I originally wrote this essay back in 2015 for a directed study in aesthetics. Just me and a handsome Yale-y philosophy professor named Tim Schoettle, sitting across from one another at his desk. We’d regularly end up sitting in silence as I pitifully strained to articulate what exactly I thought Kant is trying to say in his Critique of Judgment. The work of Danto, Wilde, and Nietzsche were safe coffee-table reads after Kant, and I loved every minute of reading them. Their deep dives into the nature of language, mass culture, and physics affirmed the broader message of my college experience: the ceiling is higher than once thought. There is more to everything than there initially seems, and there’s more to you (me) than you (I) thought. I’m still a practicing Christian today, but I have to imagine that the “born again” sensation that missed me as a teenager just showed up later when reading Danto’s After the End of Art and Wilde’s Intentions. With their words came a sense of clarity and understanding that I didn’t know could exist, one that tied up frayed ends of the mind and soul. The kind of truth that took me by complete surprise and felt so imminent that I couldn’t help but feel like I’d known it my whole life.
They say the best comedy writing is the stuff that everyone thinks about, but no one thinks everyone thinks about. We’ve all collectively agreed that taste of airplane food is a frustrating, useless, mystery, but it wasn’t funny until Seinfeld reminded us. That universal feeling truth had to be coaxed out through the frame of prime time television and a funny sounding guy from Massapequa. The sensation comes up for me with good philosophy and good art, it all generates the same feeling of personal validation. Saying what I was already thinking is why Louis CK captivated me as a performer, and realizing that masses of people followed him gave me hope that somehow, despite how alone I’d felt for much of my life, apparently I’m far from alone in these thoughts. I loved the way he could attack the evils of the world and avoid coming off as sacrosanct by admitting—like all of us—that he contributes to those same evils. It was around this time that I had learned about dissimilar comparisons (how at times it can feel more honest to describe something by what it isn’t rather than what it is) and it felt like CK was doing just that, the best anyone can this side of heaven; giving us a framework on how to be by showing us precisely what not to be.
Yeah, but we all know how this ends. Fast forward to 2017 and CK sexually misconducted his career into a (by his estimate) $35 million grave he’d apparently spent years digging for himself. There have been so many things to come crashing down in recent years—including but not limited to the sovereignty of American democracy, the global economy, and the lives of more than two-and-a-half million people—and still CK’s offenses and subsequent fall from grace still leave me feeling betrayed. It pales in comparison to what any of those women felt, but I think for me and anyone who loved his work, the pain persists so intensely for the same reason. A prophet let us down in his character, so what does that mean for all the prophesies on which we’ve invested so much? Especially in what has been called by reputable newspapers as “the post-truth era”, it has felt as though the proverbial rug had not only been pulled out from under me, but took cues from Aladdin and flew out over the horizon. Do we hang onto his material with the same unsavory apprehension we apply to the likes of Woody Allen? I don’t know that I can ever watch Annie Hall or Louie with a clean conscience again, but I do know that depraved acts can’t negate what I and others have been able to build from these men’s influence. I can no longer celebrate the men, but I can say with confidence that I can celebrate the work that the likes of Pam Adlon have been able to do despite the wrong CK’s done. Perhaps it’s the natural and unfortunate conclusion to the pedagogical approach CK used so effectively: Showing us how we should be, by showing us precisely how we shouldn’t.
Louis CK and After the End of Art
Our present understanding of the story of art can be summed up as this: After art became self aware in the Renaissance, it followed a linear path towards a singular point, became dictated by manifestos, and these manifestos resulted in movements with a recognizable aesthetic that maintained an exclusionist mentality towards work that deviated from a given set of values. There was a false break from modernism made by the post-modernists, which was false due to their being directly influenced by modernism in their creation of an anti-manifesto. Then finally a true break was made which resulted in art created in ways never before seen, since there was now no necessary tie to any historical precedent. The story of Louis C.K., the now renowned comedian, writer, director, actor, and his creative process, follow a similar trajectory, namely through his two endeavors into television: HBO’s Lucky Louie and FX’s Louie. The first finds itself in a noble but nonetheless sophomoric state similar to post modernity, trying to subvert the cultural standard in order to tap into something real. The second however, is able to spread its wings in the age of contemporary art having freed itself from the pale of history, where it is aware of but not bound to the movements before it. The transition between CK’s Lucky Louie and Louie is parallel to the transition from post-modern to contemporary art as described by Danto in his book After the End of Art.
According to Danto, the story of art had, since the Renaissance, been following a linear narrative, with each successive movement building off of the principles of that most prior. Artists like Bernini, Raphael, and Michaelangelo, rose to fame through their adherence to Vasarian renderings of the material world[1] and were judged on this ability primarily. These Vasarian works were concerned with presenting reality, uninterrupted by the distortion of human perception and as such were cherished when said works mimetically and obsessively imitated forms in life. With time however, a feeling of discontent came towards imitation of life alone and a desire to tap into that which is unseen or “find an equivalent to life[2]” was then made the focus for the work of Manet and the other impressionists. There was a desire to shift the focus of art from the mind to the intellect.
This, according to Clement Greenberg, is the beginning of modernism in the visual arts. The purpose of painting is beginning to be deconstructed and reassessed, elevating the focus of art from artistic replication of the outside, to internal reflection and the conversation between oneself and the outside. This deconstruction continued from one reactive movement to the next, each building off of the last, and each maintaining an exclusivist attitude towards movements that disagreed. Ideologies and manifestos declaring what is and is not art attempted to bring the definition of art to a refined point, and along the way created distinct aesthetics for each movement respectively. Through the drive for purity of medium, the idea of mimesis had lost relevance, and brought about paintings whose subject is painting, and sculptures whose meaning never leaves sculpture.
Once this point was reached however, it seemed there was nowhere left for the story of art to go in any linear, reactionary sense. There was a feeling in the early 20th century, that modernism had perhaps let us down, in that the “essence” of art had not been reached successfully and perhaps could never be. From this a false break from the pale of history occurred, in which the post-modernists created work that was intentionally anti-modern. This meant work took the values of modernism—purity of medium, flatness, nonmimetic representation—and replaced them with the opposite—mixed media, texture, and a return to mimesis. Duchamp’s ready-made toilet piece Fountain, epitomizes the subversive spirit of the post modernists through challenging the rigid understanding of what art is by decontextualizing an ordinary object into a gallery in order to call it art. If the Dadaists wanted to break free from the influence of the story of art, they had failed due to the fact that they were, just as all the movements before them, influenced directly by the ideals of previous movements. Furthermore, they made work with the same exclusivist attitude of prior movements which inadvertently created their own manifesto that bound their ideas, processes, and work to a recognizable style. It was only after a departure from this false break that contemporary art, as we know it now, was able to flourish and truly remove itself from the pale of history[3].
This break was made possible by ridding the need for conflict that was unavoidable in the age of manifestos. As Danto puts it, there are two ways for conflict to be avoided either through cleansing—which the manifestos of modernism attempted to bring about—or through existing together without the need for cleansing.[4] The question of what style of art is better than another is irrelevant, and instead judgments of quality are focused on the individual works. By accepting all styles, the trend of exclusivist, reactionary movements has come to an end and has resulted in art never before seen. Sincere historical appropriation and mimetic representation are no longer seen as intrinsically regressive as in Dadaism, and modernism respectively. With the ability to do anything, contemporary art is characterized by having no distinctive aesthetic as with prior movements bound to the pale of history. So what does any of this have to do with Louis C.K. and his two television shows? Lucky Louie, C.K.’s first endeavor, found itself in a limited space akin to that occupied by the postmodern artists of the early 20th century and like these same artists had a short window of relevance. Louie, on the other hand, finds itself in the contemporary, post-historical world. Explaining both programs’ relationships to post-modernism and contemporary art respectively requires—much like the explanation of both movements—context.
The story begins well before C.K. was making television shows or writing stand up. In 1950’s America, about two thirds of households had at least one television set[5], meaning that the rise of the sitcom was imminent. Programs like I Love Lucy and the Honeymooners took Americans by storm attracting an estimated 44 million regular viewers, and as such were making their mark on the cultural climate. The lines between art imitating life and life imitating art were fluid, as the characters of Ralph and Alice Kramden both took cues from and influenced the millions of people watching at home, or live in the studio audience. In a 2010 interview with fellow comedian and podcaster Marc Maron, Louis C.K. addressed this point. Here, he notes the authenticity and engagement with the studio audience present in actor Jackie Gleason’s portrayal of Ralph.
“[Gleason] was totally measured by the crowd…he would hear the laugh dying, and then he would shoot a glance at his wife and the laughter would just explode upward. And I love that kind of work, to me there is a beauty in playing an audience like an instrument.”[6]
C.K. goes on to speak to the stakes involved with sitcoms at the time, with shows like the Honeymooners and All in the Family in the 1970’s being consumed almost universally by the broader culture. This combined with the dependence of laughter from the studio audience and the need to stay relevant to so many viewers required intentional engagement with the wants, tastes, and values of said viewers. To C.K. this was a golden-age for the American sitcom, but by the 1990’s sitcoms had adopted new tactics which bothered him. He says in the same interview from 2010 that he “hated every sitcom on the air…even the good ones…”[7] referring to the enormous commercial successes like Seinfeld, Friends, and Fraiser.
The omission of the live filming was the first of numerous changes in production style from the early sitcoms to that of the 1990’s. Most sitcoms since the 90’s have chosen to film without a live studio audience and instead appoint a “laugh man” to insert prerecorded, and often recycled, laugh tracks. The community of comedy writers developing plots and punch lines for these shows had also changed. C.K. maintains that writers since the 90’s are keeping a relationship with the audience akin to that of a scientist more so than an entertainer. He feels that the content produced by “Harvard graduates who don’t like audiences” combined in part with no active engagement with the studio audience have left sitcoms detached and inauthentic. In C.K.’s story, this state of television can be likened to modernism to a point. At least in C.K.’s eyes, the writing style was formulaic and concerned with reaching a singular point, whether that be a laugh, groan, or sigh, and was done so by looking back at prior examples of what has worked historically. “Harvard graduates” study what viewers resonate with and try to fill each episode of a given sitcom with these moments or lines, which makes a more “pure” entertainment experience and also distances itself from reality which is very much impure.
To C.K., this separation from reality was also a separation from applicability to viewers, where the jokes had become so perfectly timed, and the laugh tracks so perfectly placed, that they had lost any meaningful relationship to reality. This disdain towards the state of popular sitcoms in the 90’s spurred the creation of something to redeem the genre. In 2006 C.K. partnered with other comedians sympathetic with his feelings towards the state of television and produced Lucky Louie through HBO. The show centers on Louie, (portrayed by C.K.) his wife Pamela, (portrayed by comedienne Pamela Aldon) their daughter, and their neighbors. According to C.K., the show was an attempt to restore the connection to the audience that had been lost in the recent iterations of the sitcom, and this was done through creating a show that was both familiar and jarring. Each of its 13 episodes was shot in front of a live studio audience, just as sitcoms from the “golden age” had been done. The scripts were written by team of comedians, handpicked by C.K. who maintained a flexible and reactionary attitude towards the viewers. The character of “Louie” is that of a working class, less than perfect husband and father, with a wife who has a deeper sense of morality than he. The scenes are performed on frontal sets, built in a studio, and as such, the camera angles are rigid and distant. Through using some of the hallmarks of the golden age American sitcom, C.K. created a program that he felt was bringing a modern sensibility to the classic context of a lost art form, thereby restoring the significance of the relationship between entertainer and audience.
The pilot for Lucky Louie follows a story arch typical of most sitcoms, with some kind of conflict introduced, said conflict is worked over, and then is eventually resolved with a “feel-good” ending. The episode opens with the camera panning to Louie and his daughter, Lucy, eating breakfast at the kitchen table as a light-hearted tune plays. She asks her father a question about breakfast and the sunrise, to which Louie responds. She then begins asking “why?” to every answer Louie provides, creating a seemingly infinite regression of explanations that finally ends in Louie answering “Because there is no God and we’re alone.” Lucy is silent for a moment, then smiles and responds with a cheery “Okay!” and continues eating her cereal. It is at this point that one realizes this show may indeed be under the appearances of the common sitcom, but with such an abrupt and nihilistic statement, there is likely a difference in content. In the next scene, the kitchen is decorated for Lucy’s fifth birthday, and over the course of the celebration she receives a handgun replica from her uncle, which she cherishes, and an African American Barbie doll from her neighbors—also African American—which she rejects. By the end of the episode Louie has masturbated in his pantry, been explicitly seduced by his wife, said twelve unique curses not permitted on daytime television, and finally had sex in the same pantry mentioned earlier. Dispersed between all of this are semi-serious conversations about poverty, racism, parenting, divorce, domestic violence, and drug abuse. Despite maintaining the appearances of the standard sitcom, the topics and content could not be farther from that, and in C.K.’s eyes, it is content that is deeply relational to the viewers. Despite his best intentions, the series ran for only one season before being cancelled.
There were some choices made in the production of the show that complicated this sought after relationship and shortened its window of appreciation in a similar way to the artists of post-modernity. Much of this is rooted in the fact that Lucky Louie was both paying tribute to a bygone era, but also heavily trying to subvert the current one. The set, for example, was made intentionally to look cheap to speak to the decrease in quality present in other sitcoms of the time. Each episode also came with a spoken disclaimer saying “Lucky Louie is filmed in front of a live studio audience” and editorialized with generic rock music, both again speaking to clichés and the cumbersome nature of the American sitcom. In Maron’s words, the intellectual conceit was lost on most viewers who mistook self-aware sets and music as poorly planned and executed. The conceit was so broadly missed that reviews of the show even assumed that the reactions for the live studio audience were prerecorded laugh tracks like other shows at the time. In hindsight, C.K. felt that viewers had trouble with Lucky Louie in large part because the norms of what was on television did not prepare them for it.
Even though the show broke new ground by addressing topics rarely touched by popular sitcoms, and never in such explicit words, C.K. and fellow comedians regard Lucky Louie in a similar way that some contemporary critics may judge the immediate post-modern: a noble experiment, but ultimately restricted to a given time and audience. It was a program driven by distaste for a particular style, which also sought to be different. It was something made as a reaction to previous trends; it became a formulaic in its consistent utilization of equal and opposite elements from the movement it was resisting. This repeated usage, and strict guidelines, despite having honest content, pigeonholed the show into a distinct and predictable aesthetic. Furthermore Lucky Louie, like Duchamp’s Fountain have, in effect, an exhaustible “punch line” where the statement made once might be fresh and enticing, but repeated a dozen times loses its relevance. The combination of these factors is what made a true break from pale of history impossible under the tactics used in Lucky Louie and the artists of post-modernity. It was only with C.K.’s next endeavor that he would truly find relevance with the audience and critics.
In 2010, C.K. signed with the network channel FX to begin production on Louie, a forty-minute program slotted for prime time[8]. The show again stars C.K. as “Louie” who, like much of the show, is a semi-autobiographical representation of C.K. Like Louis C.K., the character of “Louie” is a divorced comedian, living in Manhattan with his two daughters. Episodes tell the story of Louie dealing with themes similar to that of Lucky Louie, such as navigating the awkwardness of daily social interaction, parenting, and financial struggles, while touching on previously unexplored subjects. Topics like suicide, struggles with obesity, aging, loneliness, religion, and depression are at times the topics of entire episodes, and are delivered with a unique tone dissimilar from Lucky Louie and the sitcoms it attempted to subvert.
The pilot of Louie begins with no introduction, and viewers are put inside the Comedy Cellar, a real comedy club in Greenwich Village. This indicates the first of many distinctions from Lucky Louie; while C.K.’s first show was filmed in a controlled, constructed set, Louie is filmed on location in New York City and its surrounding areas. This combined with the semi-autobiographical nature of the show is important in placing Louie in the contemporary realm. Contemporary art is not concerned, as the modernists were, with purity[9]. By combining the real and the fictitious, the intentional with the coincidental, Louie blurs the lines between documentary and television in a way that sitcoms, and C.K.’s commentary on them, did not. The tone of ambivalence is a hallmark of contemporary art because of the movement’s general acceptance of all styles. This does not mean that control is relinquished entirely, as C.K. and his crew are intentional about cropping, sound, and lighting, as seen throughout the pilot, but unintentional, or impure successes are embraced alongside the controlled.
In the Comedy Cellar, Louie is delivering a monologue to the audience, who are seated at tables watching him. His speech is focused on the poor design of cardboard milk cartons and the stupidity of the children who try to open them. The scene then cuts to Louie ushering his elementary age daughter and her classmates into a school bus for a trip to the zoo, on which he is a chaperone. During the course of the trip Louie gets into several arguments with the aloof bus driver who he accosts for being neglectful and apathetic to the safety of the children on the trip. The contrast between Louie during the stand-up set and Louie as a caring father is a type of humor used throughout the series and in C.K.’s real life stand up comedy. The viewer is never entirely sure if the character of Louie is actually a caring father who would do anything for his children or if he is closer to the opposite. This is a dichotomy addressed in Lucky Louie numerous times, yet the degree to which viewers are kept in an ambivalent viewing context in Louie solidifies the disorientation. Furthermore, given the “semi” autobiographical nature of the show, viewers are also left to decide whether an aspect of the real Louis C.K. is being represented on the screen, or just the character of “Louie”. C.K. cites this tactic as another attempt to make an authentic piece of television, where characters are more than one-dimensional portraits and show complexity that is more true to life than their sitcom counterparts[10].
The episode thus far has dealt with ambivalence between the righteous and the reprehensible, and to this point has done so through a generally realistic portrayal. Realistic here meaning the dialogue has been true to real life in its pacing, and the events that have transpired have been minimally sensationalized. This changes tone slightly at first and then severely later in the episode, with the first instance happening as Louie is knocking on the door of his date for the afternoon. After knocking and being met with a “just one minute” from his date, an elderly woman across the hall pokes her head out and asks Louie to keep it down because she is “completely naked in here”. The woman keeps letting Louie know just how nude she is until Louie tells her that she is going to show him anyway so she might as well do it. She silently steps out of the doorway to reveal herself for only a few seconds while Louie dispassionately observes. She then begins shouting “Pig!” at Louie and returns to her room just as Louie’s date is exiting her apartment. After attempting, and failing, to explain what just happened, he leaves the building with his date.
Over the course of several hours, the two look for a place to eat with limited success, Louie stumbles over his words and wrestles with the fact that he is an older, underwhelming man on a date with someone younger and more attractive. This conflict builds up to a monologue delivered by Louie to his date on why, despite social norms, as an older man and a father he is a prime partner for a younger woman. What seems like a successful argument at first gives Louie the courage to go in for a kiss, but he is rejected as his date jumps up and runs to a helicopter that was positioned behind the camera the entire shot. It takes off, and Louie sits alone as he watches it fly into the distance. At the end of the episode, Louie is shown walking down a Greenwhich Village street with his daughters having a casual conversation, in a realist fashion. The show’s moments of the believable, the far-fetched, and the downright impossible are in a conversation with each other that is unique to the contemporary[11]. This mixing of styles could not have been done, say, fifty years ago, because the given styles had not been developed or assigned titles, and so could not be appropriated. Even the idea of sincerely mixing styles, with no intention to subvert, would have been difficult because the historic precedent was to maintain purity and the progressive trajectory of modernism, or in the case of postmodernism, to subvert these values.
To a point, these tactics had created an aesthetic that became a staple of the series, particularly in seasons one through three. However in 2013 C.K. took a nine-month hiatus[12] to make “the show feel new again.” C.K. felt as though the series had been successful, but he wanted to forget the formula in order to explore new creative avenues. He spent more time than ever before writing and spent a year in production instead of the six-month period he had done before[13]. The result was a fourth series with a different—though not a reactionary opposite—tone than that of the first three, with episodes dealing with the serious issues touched on by past seasons and expanding on them to a point that the first three seasons had not. For example, season four’s episode Into the Woods has no stand up segments from the Comedy Cellar incorporated into the plot. The episode is entirely comprised of Louie dealing with catching his oldest daughter, Jane, smoking pot in a city park and then flashing back to Louie’s own childhood and his experiences with smoking pot. While serious content is not uncommon for the series, it is uncommon to leave it unframed by the Comedy Cellar scenes. This change of tone is prevalent throughout season four, which even more than previous seasons, deals with issues of depression, loneliness, and parenting. C.K.’s intentionality at maintaining freshness to Louie implies something importantly characteristic of contemporary art: a disassociation with a distinct style. This is done, in contrast to art done before the break from the pale, by making choices and work that moves around but not towards a distinct linear goal or direction. On a macro level this is seen in C.K.’s choice to change major elements from season to season, but it can even be seen on a micro level when individual episodes often finish without a clear sense of resolve.
Where Lucky Louie had a subversive mission that lead to a formulaic means of production, Louie has no mission so clear. What Louie seems to be doing is what Lucky Louie lost to its being in such direct reactionary conversation with the sitcoms of the time; create a piece of television that can relate to viewers in a meaningful way. Both shows have philosophic elements, based around the personal worldviews C.K. and his writers, yet Louie is able to articulate these philosophies without an underlying manifesto saying that this given kind of thought or television is better than any other; it is only posing certain philosophies and styles without comparison. Louie also better marries various styles than Lucky Louie, which seems to be concerned with joining one distinct style with the subversive content of another distinct style. The ambivalence created by Louie is also more nuanced than that of Lucky Louie, much because of the blurring of the line between reality and art that is possible due to the semi-autobiographical, and on-site shooting of the former. The combination of these factors are what sets Louie apart from both Lucky Louie and the pale of history, and are what joins it with the work of the contemporary era.
Works Cited
C.K., Louis. "Louis C.K. from 2010." Interview by Marc Maron. Audio blog post. WTF Podcast. N.p., 14 Dec. 2014. Web. Apr. 2015.
Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997. Print.
Gross, Terry. "Louis C.K. On His 'Louie' Hiatus: 'I Wanted The Show To Feel New Again'" Audio blog post. NPR. National Public Radio, 19 May 2014. Web. Apr. 2015.
Harris, Adam. "How Louis C.K. Shoots and Edits His Own Show." Gizmodo. Gizmodo, 8 Oct. 2010. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.
USHistory.org. "Land of Television." Ushistory.org. Independence Hall Association, n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.
[1] Danto, Arthur C. "Chapter 1." After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997. 8. Print.
[2] Ibid. p.53
[3] Ibid. p.10
[4] Ibid. p.37
[5] "Land of Television." Ushistory.org. Independence Hall Association, 2008. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.
[6] C.K., Louis. "WTF: Louis C.K." Interview by Marc Maron. Louis C.K. from 2010. WTF Podcast, Oct. 2010. Web. Apr. 2015. <http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/louis_c.k._from_2010>.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Harris, Adam (October 8, 2010). "How Louis C.K. Shoots and Edits His Own Show". Gizmodo. Retrieved July 20, 2011.
[9] Op Cit. A. Danto, p.67-8
[10] Op Cit. Marc Maron. Louis C.K. podcast
[11] Op. Cit. Danto p.36
[12] Gross, Terry. "Louis C.K. On His 'Louie' Hiatus: 'I Wanted The Show To Feel New Again'" Audio blog post. NPR. National Public Radio, 19 May 2014. Web. Apr. 2015.
[13] Ibid.