Louis CK Won A Grammy!
That does not mean that cancel culture is fake.
Last night Louis CK won a grammy for best comedy album, his first since he publicly admitted to masturbating in front of women comics at a comedy festival in 2017. His conduct was particularly damaging because his sensitive-guy persona defined his relationship to his audience.
In his iconic and eponymous FX series, Louis played a divorced single father, working as a comedian in New York City’s West Village, where he portrayed himself as a schlub, always torn between his appetites and desires to be a better person. His struggles to be good endeared him to his audience.
But if a character is struggling to be good, they have to be struggling against something real. Louis depicted both personal triumphs and the defeats. Like, when he brings a date to The Donut Pub, a notorious Manhattan shithole next to a dive bar on west 14th street, they encounter loud and foul mouthed punks who ruin their time. Louis tries to step up to get the kids to pipe down, but when they threaten to kick his ass, cowardice overtakes him and he allows himself to be browbeaten by a teenager. His date struggles to be sympathetic, but ultimately admits she was irreparably turned off by his inability to defend her or himself. Unable to let it go, Louis tracks down the kid’s parents in Staten Island, and complains to them. The father beats his son over it and Louis realizes that he’s perpetuated a cycle of physical abuse, passed down through generations of this family. This is Louis — weak in all the ways that draw the audience’s sympathy but ultimately aware that he has a responsibility to others than transcends his own needs.
In pre-scandal real life, Louis had a reputation as a creative mensch. He used Louis to feature other comedians, exposing some people from the New York comedy scene to wider audiences. He produced and encouraged new talent and he was well known in Manhattan as a philanthropist and good neighbor. His sexual misconduct tarnished all of this and so he lost his FX series, lost deals for specials with HBO and never found distribution for his self-produced and directed feature film.
He had his creative and commercial projects cancelled by production partners who didn’t want to be associated with him and who believed that, at least for a time, that Louis could no longer connect to his audience.
That is, in fact, “cancel culture.”
But Louis didn’t shut up. He went to work on new material. Tenuously, he appeared unannounced at The Comedy Cellar to try out his new routine. This sparked a debate about whether unannounced appearances by comedians accused of sexual misconduct might be immoral and potentially triggering to some audience members. Previously, the unannounced appearance of a big name comic at the end of a regular club show was considered a fantastic perk for club patrons. You get the show you paid for and then a surprise performance by a big name talent, working material the public has never seen before. But when Louis did it, it became an ethical issue for both the performer and the establishment.
Then another conversation started. Comedians are professionals. This is all work for profit. If this is how people build their careers and pay their bills than the club, which is effectively the office, cannot be a bachanal of drugs, alcohol, and sexual license. Ultimately, shouldn’t an employee at IBM expect the same protections as an employee of The Laugh Factory? Or does comedy exist outside the world of human resources professionalism? Society seems determined to answer yes to the former and no to the latter.
Be that as it may, Louis continued creating comedy. He lost some old fans, but found new ones. Not everybody believed that the show Louis needed to be taken off the air or that Louis needed to be banned from comedy clubs. This is the problem with cancel culture — while it satisfies some who want a figure totally removed from society, it limits the rights of other people to go on enjoying somebody’s work regardless. Maybe you can never watch Louis again, but what if your neighbor wants to?
People went to Louis’ website and bought his specials. While Louis had lost future earnings for his conduct, he had not lost previously earned capital. So he could invest in himself in ways very few can. Quite naturally, the audience who had shunned him became the butts of his new jokes. Now, Louis tours the world, filling big arenas with paying audiences. He even produced a very funny informercial where you can buy his stand-up. Now, he’s won a Grammy, not because sexual harassment is okay, but because some judges thought his jokes were better than the jokes on the other nominated albums.
To which, Louis’ detractors respond, “You see? Cancel culture isn’t real!”
The idea that cancel culture doesn’t exist because an artist (or any public figure), can succeed in spite of it doesn’t make sense. It’s just a way for cancel culture practitioners to deny responsibility for their choices: “Sure, I got somebody’s book deal revoked, but they can always self-publish, so it’s not like I did anything bad to them. Nobody has a rigt to a book deal.” What would make cancel culture real to a person who thinks this way? A death sentence? Total historical erasure of the type not even achievable by Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet?
Cancel culture exists, it’s just that its power isn’t total because, as Dave Chappelle reminds us, “Twitter isn’t a real place.” Anybody who wants to cancel Louis C.K. from their lives can do so easily by not watching him. What they can’t do, and this is what bugs them, is cancel Louis C.K. for others who like his work. Whatever side you take, don’t fret. That there are limits to the cultural power of Twitter is really a very good thing. It’s a fun platform, but a terrible place for working out the complexities of a culture.