Louis CK

Louis CK on why resistance in art is necessary, why you should make short films, and his advice for a young comedian.

A brief overview of Louis CK before delving into his own words:

Who (Identity)	Louis Székely, known professionally as Louis C.K., is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and filmmaker, known for his influential contributions to comedy and entertainment.
What (Contributions)	Louis C.K. is celebrated for his stand-up comedy, television work, and filmmaking. He is known for his honest and often darkly humorous observations on everyday life, as well as his critically acclaimed TV series “Louie.” His work delves into themes of human behavior, relationships, and self-exploration.
When (Period of Influence)	Louis C.K.’s influence in the world of comedy and entertainment began in the 1990s and continued into the 21st century. He is recognized as a significant figure in modern stand-up comedy.
Where (Geographic Focus)	Born in Washington, D.C., USA, Louis C.K.’s comedy often reflects American culture and society, though his observations on human behavior are relatable on a global scale.
Why (Artistic Philosophy)	Louis C.K.’s artistic philosophy centers on brutally honest and self-reflective comedy. He believes in confronting uncomfortable truths and the absurdities of life with humor, often challenging societal norms and expectations.
How (Technique and Style)	Known for his observational and self-deprecating humor, Louis C.K.’s comedy style is characterized by its raw and unfiltered storytelling. He often addresses personal experiences, family dynamics, and the human condition with a candid and relatable approach.

This post is a collection of selected quotes and excerpts from secondary sources used for educational purposes, with citations found at the end of the article.

Making Short Films

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I like making short films. You can do anything you want in a short film because it doesn’t have the weight of a feature [film] where every moment has to serve the entire film.

If you have a weird little idea you can just go out and make a short film about it and people can watch it for a short time and then move on to whatever the next thing is they’re doing in their lives.

So I just always encourage people to make short films because it’s the one thing in film that you can always do. There are people laying all over the streets who are great and qualified and talented filmmakers, directors of photography and editors who have nothing to do and they are always eager to jump on a project with someone who is into it.

For those of you out there who are thinking of making shorts and have never made one, you should just go ahead and do it. ¹

Advice For A Young Comedian

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I started when i was 17. I got a good head start, skill-building wise, but I sometimes think I missed out on a lot of “Life” that I could be drawing from now. Try to go to college and get some knowlege. If you don’t do that, make a deliberate attempt to read a lot and educate yourself, so that you don’t just become a siv for American pop culture.

If you spend all your time on stage talking about the cover of People magazine, you won’t go far, you won’t last, and you’ll be bored before you get good. Take advantage of the head start you’re giving yourself by stopping as often as possible to live your life, explore America and grow as a person.

When you go to some shit town to do a one-nighter, get there early and walk around before the show. Watch people. Observe and remember.

Go on stage as often as possible. Any stage anywhere. Don’t listen to anyone about anything. Just keep getting up there and try to be funny, honest and original. Know that it’s not going to be easy. Know that it’s going to take a long time to be good or great.

Don’t focus on the career climbing. Focus on the getting funnier. The second you are bitching about what another comic is getting you are going in the completely wrong direction. No one is getting your gig or your money.

Keep in mind that you are in for a looooong haul of ups and downs and nothing and something. It takes at least 15 years, usually more, to make a great comic. most flame out before they get there.

And yes, be polite and courteous to every single person you deal with. Not because that will make you a better comedian, but because you’re supposed to do that.

As far as how to get funny or write jokes, no one can teach you that. Just make sure you know what you’re trying to do and that you’re doing it in a way no one else is doing. If anyone tells you they can teach you how to do comedy, they are lying.

I agree with Bent that you should fill yourself with the history of standup. Watch Richard Pryor Live in Concert, Bill Cosby Himself, and listen to all of their albums as well as any other comedy cd you can get your hands on. ²

You have to be very resilient. You can’t really take advice from anybody, just have to try and find your own path of going on and trying and failing and trying and failing. Don’t get addicted to your jokes. Once you get a joke that gets a laugh, you’ll never want to stop doing it because your body doesn’t want to be in pain. So you think this joke always kills and you wrote it in your first year. What are the odds it’s good? It stinks.

You just have to live with the premise that whatever you’re doing as a standup is probably really bad even if it’s working. I did the same act for 20 years because I was terrified to stop doing jokes that killed, and then I got rid of it and now I’ve done four or five hours in four or five years because I just decided to stop. I’m either going to kill myself or do this the harder way. ³

Anxiety

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You’ve said you learned in therapy that your compulsive behavior – eating, sex – is just self-medicating your anxiety. Does having that insight help?

Oh, definitely. Once you say that to yourself, “Oh, this is anxiety,” you get to say to yourself, “Why am I anxious?” because when something’s bothering you, you don’t name it, you just start eating something. I’m still going to eat the two Twinkies, but when I start opening the second packet, I say to myself, “What’s going on, buddy?” That will get me to two Twinkies instead of eight. ⁴

Favourite Books

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I loved the Great Gatsby. I can’t believe they did it in 3D. What the fuck? Dahrma bums. these are just random. My Travels with Charlie. Grapes of Wrath. Crime and Punishment. Slaughterhouse 5. All vonugut when i was a youngster. Catcher in the Rye. 9 Stories. SOmething by Thomas Mann I can’t remember. Heart of Darkness. I claudius. The Golden Ass. Hercules my shipmate. Fire from Heaven. Persian boy. The chronicles of narnia when I was a kid and now my daughters. TR biography. lots others. ⁵

Learning From Failure

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The thing that you learn the most that will help you do things you can’t do yet is how to recover from failure. If you can recover from things not going well, then the worst that happens is this is going to be a total wreck but I know how to recover. ⁶

The only way to learn that stuff is by failing; all this is learned by having bad times. You have to be willing to have a bad time. People that need to feel like a star and like they’re succeeding every time will not ever get better. But if you are willing to feel bad, do badly, have a stale, boring version of yourself out in front of everybody, you can find this stuff in the muck that’s very useful. ⁴

How He Got Better As A Comedian

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Right out of high school I started doing stand-up. I didn’t go to college, didn’t pursue anything else professionally really. First time I went on stage I did a minute and a half and I bombed. It was terrible but I wanted it so badly that I kept trying. I learned how to write jokes and I just had jokes, kind of funny thoughts and I don’t know 15 years later I had been going in a circle that didn’t take me anywhere.

Nobody gave a shit who I was and I didn’t either, I honestly didn’t. I used to hear my act and go this is shit and I hate it but I’ve been doing this for 15 years and then stopping now is like getting out of prison, like what do you do after 15 years of stand-up comedy, how do you enter the workforce?

{…} So I was doing a Chinese restaurant called the Kowloon in Boston, Saugus Massachusetts and I was sitting in my car after the show just feeling like this was all a big mistake, I’m not good enough. I felt like my jokes were a trap.

Then I listened to a CD of George {Carlin} talking about comedy and talking about it seriously and the thing that blew me away about this fellow was that he just kept putting out specials every year. They just kept coming and each one was deeper than the next and I have just thought how can he do that. It made me literally cry that I could never do that. I was telling the same jokes for 15 years.

So I’m listening and they asked him how do you do all this material and he says well I just decided every year I’d be working on that year’s special and I’d do the special and then I just chuck out the material and I’d start again with nothing and I thought that’s crazy. How do you throw it away, it took me 15 years to build this shitty hour, if I throw it away I got nothing. But he gave me the courage to try.

I thought well okay, when you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs you throw those away, what do you have left? You can only dig deeper, start talking about your feelings and who you are and then you do those jokes and they’re gone and you got to dig deeper. So then you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares and doing jokes about that and then they’re gone, and then you start going into just weird shit.

It’s a process that I watched him do my whole life and I started to try to do it and I started to think what do I because he says whatever he wants, what do I really want to say that I’m afraid to say? At the time I was a father, {…} and I was having a lot of hard time being a father and I wanted to say it on stage and one night I just I thought forget all the old jokes, I’m gonna start again and I thought of the first thing, I said I can’t have sex with my wife because we have a baby and our baby’s a fucking asshole. It’s just what I was feeling and I said it and the audience went whoa and I thought oh I’m somewhere new now. ⁷

When I started, I just devoured comedy. I went to clubs every night even if I wasn’t working. I would be on stage maybe twice a week but I was at clubs seven nights a week. Watching every comedian I could, good or bad, friend or foe, it didn’t matter I just watched it and just loaded it into my system. ⁸

You Should Be Able To Make A Joke About Anything

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I remember saying one time that saying something is too terrible to joke about is like saying a disease is too terrible to try to cure it. I mean that’s what you do with awful things. You joke about them. That’s how you get through it. It’s how you survive life.

So to say – that’s so terrible, I can’t joke about it – that is totally counterintuitive to me. It’s like if it’s that awful, you better start joking about it because that’s how human beings get through it. ⁹

Why He Doesn’t Like Writing Down His Comedy Sets

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I had an acting coach named Bob Krakower, and he said something to me that I always remember, which is if you perform something twice and you do it differently each time, that means you’re doing it well, because you’re focusing on the intention and not the mechanics.

I’ve always thought about that in stand-up: Whenever you have success, which is getting a laugh, you’re going to keep doing it, and it’s a path that gets grooved in deeper and deeper, but it starts to lose its luster after a while.

Sometimes with certain bits, I realize they’re getting kind of crusty, so I go, “Forget how you say this bit, go back to the wordless idea, and express it as if you never said it before.” If you do that with a joke five times and then mix the five versions, you get this amazing thing. ⁴

Making A Comedy Special

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I used to describe it like the way they make samurai swords or used to, that they bang it and then fold it and then bang it again, and then they fold it and keep banging it. So you know they pound on it. And they fold it so that they’re squeezing out all the oxygen, just keep making it perfect. 

So every time you think I’ve got an hour, no you don’t. You write another hour and you fold it into that one and then get rid of all the impurities and all the bad stuff and then keep doing that. 

Your closing bit can make you very sluggish, you know, because about 20 minutes into your [60 or 90 minute] set you’re now 20 minutes away from your big 20 minute closer which you know is not going to fail.

So I started making life hard for myself by opening with the closer. Like let’s open with the hardest material. Then I have to follow it, I have to follow my toughest material with stuff that’s pretty weak and I have no closer, I have nothing to depend on, there’s just an open wound at the end.

If I did that, then this bit would just, through need, it would cauterize and become the closer and then you put that at the beginning and you keep doing that until you have hopefully 90 minutes of closing bits where you could just flop them out and it doesn’t matter what order you do it. ⁸

Staying Healthy As A Comedian

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If you want to have any longevity as a comedian, or if you want your brain and body to provide you with any consistent creative flow, you have to eat somewhat right and do some excercize of some kind.

I started running years ago and though I often fuck up and stop for a long time, it keeps me alive. Especially when I’m on the road, I like to run every day and explore the towns i’m working in. I try to eat shitloads of fruit too. Recently I started jumping rope which feels gay and wonderful at the same time.

For me, it’s not really about weight loss. Training just makes me sharper and mostly increases my endurance.

Let me put it to you all this way: Trying to be a standup comedian for a living, or beyond that, trying to pursue a life in comedy that has longevity and bredth, is crazily hard.

Lots of folks say it takes 15, maybe 20 years to make a great comic. Lots of people start out with a lot of talent but by the time they hit that many years they’ve given up, become bitter and crusty or have died from ill health and depression.

Outside of all that, it seems to me that if you’re trying to do something extrordinary, which succeeding as a comedian is, if only by virtue of the fact that almost no one pulls it off, then you should get yourself into the best possible shape. I don’t mean looks or weight, I just mean getting yourself ready, steeling yourself, improving your abilities and stregths as a person..

Given the odds of making it as a comedian, I am amazed at how little effort so many comedians make, while complaining bitterly about their lack of breaks. I mean, you should be thinking like an olympic athlete but you think like dorito-eating high school brats, doing nothign and expecting everything. Of course I’m not talking about YOU, whoever is reading this. I’m talking about YOU, over there. Yeah.

Every time I run, I reach about fifty points in my run where I want to quit. I reach about 100 points where I am SURE I’m going to quit. But I keep going and when I finish, I’ve just proven to myself that I can survive self doubt and exhaustioin. This is an invaluable tool for me as a comedian, writer and producer. Everything I do is helped by exercize. Even if I can’t spell it right.

One other thing, I NEVER listen to music when I run. This is my reason: When I get to those points, going up a horrible hill, running staright into a cold wind, I have to reach somewhere inside myself to get through it. If I have an ipod suplying me with “Eye of the Tiger” or some wonderful Cher song, then that gets me through.

That’s no good to me because next time I’m on a stage getting tired, or next time I’m shooting number 9 of 20 shows or next time I just want to fucking eat a bag of poison because I get sick of my life, I’d rather have whatever tool I built inside myself on that hill, then have to listen to cher every time. ¹⁰

Resistance In Art

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Some resistance and obstacle is always good for art I think. It’s like Michelangelo has this big block of marble and he needs to dig David out of there. Not only does he need to chip away just the right amount of marble, but he has to then find this thing in there and then he has to smooth that out, make it perfect. If Michelangelo was given a marble that just comes away really easily, would he have been a better sculptor?

There’s something about just being like ‘I don’t think I can do this’, I think it’s a great push for an artist. When you think a lot of the greatest movies were made very much in the studio system, and they were made by people who were faced with all kinds of fear and myopia from their studios and they led them out of it. I think sometimes it can sharpen your vision when you have to convince people. ¹¹

How He Got Total Control Over His TV Show Louie

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I got it by demanding it and refusing to do the show any other way at all and by having the leverage that I was completely willing to walk away without doing the show and by agreeing to an extremely low budget so that they could offset the risk of giving me this freedom becuase they are risking less money. ¹²

Writing Process For Louie

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I start each season by thinking of raw ideas and writing them in a notebook — I don’t write on a computer for a while. I compile ideas first. Some are story ideas overall; some are settings like: “Let’s go on the road. Let’s do something at a hospital.” And some are just characters or funny moments. Then I make note cards for the stories, but I’m still not thinking about episodes; I just write the stories and themes.

I essentially have an “idea season” and then a “writing season,” where I write all the scripts. They’re just pages, though — I don’t even know if they’re going to be whole episodes or not. Only when we start shooting do we start seeing how long stuff is. For example, I wrote a story that was around 100 pages, and it turned into six episodes. We shoot and figure out in editing what works. ¹³

When it’s time to write, I have one computer that has no ability to get on the Internet. Because the ability to just move your finger less than a millimeter and be looking straight into someone’s pussy or at the new Porsche, or a whole movie – To Kill a Mockingbird, let’s just sit here and watch the whole thing! – it’s too much. So if you put a couple of moves between you and that, you’ve got a fighting chance.

When I hit a stopping moment in what I’m writing, a moment of agitation – that itch always leads to a brand-new thing, to inspiration. But if you bail out and buy a product online, you’re robbing yourself. It’s terrible, so I sit there: “Fuck, fuck.” The worst thing happening to this generation is that they’re taking discomfort away from themselves. ⁴

Quitting Drugs

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What had prompted you to quit drugs in the first place?

My mom told me to cut it out. She just said, “You can’t do this anymore, I can’t help you have this life anymore.” I felt bad; it was so unfair to be putting her into stress. Also, I wasn’t enjoying my life anymore, I really wasn’t. I wasn’t feeling anything anymore.

Part of the reason people do drugs is because they can’t access their feelings, or there are certain feelings that are too much for them to access, so they do drugs to shut down. When I was younger, before I did drugs, I wanted to do creative things, write and stuff like that. I had a lot I enjoyed about life, then it all became about getting high. It was so empty. ⁴

Creative Process For His TV Miniseries Horace and Pete

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The creative process is like you create the people and the world. And then you see if it writes. If you can sit down and write. And it just flowed. I believed in the people. They felt real to me.

Every episode I would sit down and I would just be writing. I put the people in the rooms in my head and I have them talk to each other. And it’s like I’m hearing it and quickly copying it down like a stenographer or a court reporter.

Before I write it I walk around, driving myself crazy thinking about it. I carve — I do all the carving up here {points to his head}. And I know what’s going to happen. I think about what it means in each interaction and what direction it’s going to go. And I think about all of that for a long time. It’s like being pregnant and finally I regurgitate it on to the page. 

And after that, maybe right before we shoot, we do a rehearsal for a whole day, we rehearse the show over and over again. And then I will look at it and go maybe there are a few things I could change. I usually keep the dialogue all the same, there is an integrity to that, like how you first wrote it. But I might cut and I might add things. But I don’t change the little lines inside. I think that — it feels like tampering. ⁹

Writing Process For Film

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A movie is a design that’s like a blueprint and that’s something that you could take forever on. The more time you spend on it {writing} probably the better in most cases. I like first drafts, the original words, so I try to fuck with it as little as possible.

I try to edit, be editorial, but not to rewrite too much because that’s too much manipulation and intent and it becomes writerly. It becomes very carved and baroque. When you look at something that has so much carving on it you’re like that’s disgusting. ¹¹

Favourite Films

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In an email to his subscribers (on his website louisck.com), Louis runs through some of his favourite films he recommends you could watch in your free time:

First, three films by a great director from back in the 30s and 40s named Frank Borzage.  This guy was way ahead of his time. He had a sense of rare sense of human dialogue especially for the era and he picked terrific stories to tell.  

Three Comrades

Flight Command (Amazing air combat sequences considering the time they were filmed) 

Strange Cargo (There does not exist a bad movie with Joan Crawford In it.  She was a great judge of scripts and used her star power to champion the careers of directors she believed in. and I can’t believe Clark Gable actually Existed) 

Sticking with Clark Gable for a moment there is 

Boomtown 

Mutiny On The Bounty
(Also with an incredible performance by Charles Laughton. )

Staying in old black and white There is nothing like the great “Pre-code era” films. For those of you unaware these Were movies made in the 1930s, before the “Hays code” (WHICH IS WHAT decided what was OK and not OK or right and wrong to put in a movie.) There was this little Window where it hadn’t occurred to anyone to put restrictions on FILMS. They were like books or plays. And then somebody figured out what a massive influence they were so they locked it all down. But before that happened there were some astonishing films made. These films did not have a moral code.  So they were able to explore some tantalizing extremes in story and character but also they were able to make films just about people being people acting like people.

Baby Face

Barbara Stanwyck Is amazing in this brutal and dark  and sometimes hilarious story of a woman Who was handed a terrible life and responds to it bye going out into the world with a brutal And exhilarating  mission of perfect self interest.

Dinner At Eight

This is a wonderful movie to watch now because it’s about a bunch of people living at the precipice of a world that is about to fall apart ( the Great Depression) It’s a very funny movie. My favorite “precode” moment in the movie is a scene where a doctor is caught by his wife philandering with another woman. She confronts him and he admits it and they have a real dialogue about how to move forward  In their marriage which is not resolved and incrediblu relatable.  You couldn’t have a dialogue like this after the hayse code. Because anyone who did something wrong in a movie had to be cast as an absolute villain.  And no one “good“ could make a mistake unless that mistake was perfectly corrected and the character completely reformed by the end of the movie.  Which is not real and not human.  

Dinner at 8 offers no judgement or solutions. It just lays bare the flaws in all its human characters,,  for the audience to identify with and laugh at.  
The Hayes Code made that impossible and began a trend that lasted for decades dividing human souls and behavior into “good“ and “bad” .

None of that moral polarization leaves room for understanding human beings or creating characters in fiction that allow the audience to see themselves in the story and to feel less alone, instead of hero’s and villains that make them feel small and ashamed.  

That’s not to say that great films weren’t made in those decades. And of course in the 1970s there was this crazy resurgence of honest filmmaking. Which brings me to: 

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore directed by Martin Scorsese 

Starting Ellen Burstyn (one of my favorite actors of all time) and Kris Kristofferson (I would also like to recommend that you listen to his song “Sunday morning coming down“ before you watch the movie) 
After you watch this film, look for an interview with Ellen Burstyn where she tells an amazing story of how the ending came about. She developed this movie herself and is really responsible for how great it is.

Gloria

Gena Rowlands 

A great low budget action movie by John Cassavetes. I could certainly go on about John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands 

A Woman Under The Influence
Opening Night etc 

But there is one movie they brought them together that a lot of people haven’t seen.

A Child Is Waiting

Also with Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland. This is a very very fucking sad movie man. It’s intense.

Oh.  Burt Lancaster.  Please tell me that you haven’t seen 

Elmer Gantry 
Sweet Smell of Success. 
Also with Tony Curtis who made some goofy movies but also some great ones like

The Defiant Ones
And The Boston Strangler which is a really Strange movie. The second half of the movie, which is basically a dialogue between the great Henry Fonda and Tony Curtis as a mass murderer Is some great acting and filmmaking.  
I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else.

Speaking of completely enigmatic movies there is the Brazilian film 

City of God

Hanging on Brazil for one more there is 

Black Orpheus 
Holy shit that’s a beautiful movie. 

If you want a couple of incredibly sad but beautiful movies there is 

I Remember Mama (best death scene in any movie ever) 

Miracle In The Rain (Jane wyman, Ronald Reagan’s first wife, Is heartbreaking in this and also the next one) 

All That Heaven Allows 

One of my favorite filmmakers is very little known and I’m not sure where you can find his movies but his name is Michael Romer.
He made two movies

Nothing But A Man 
And 
The Plot Against Harry 

If you want to movie that’s just a really feel good fun movie there is

Breaking Away

And the number one movie but I recommend to anyone who has not seen it is Alfonso Cuaron‘s masterpiece.

Children of Men 

OK I’m gonna stop there. I did not intend to make such a long list. It was really just gonna be three or four movies. But that was fun. I’ll do it again sometime.

Thank you, both of you who are still reading.  

Regards 

Louis CK 

The following films were mentioned from various sources such as his old tweets, old Opie & Anthony shows and Q&A’s:

• Putney Swope
• The Piano Teacher
• Abigails Party
• Goodfellas
• The Lunchbox
• Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
• Stranger Than Paradise
• Raging Bull
• Apocalypse Now
• Hearts of Darkness

His favourite filmmakers as mentioned in his Hilarious Q&A:

• Woody Allen
• Martin Scorsese
• Stanley Kubrick
• Jean-Luc Godard
• Albert Brooks
• Pier Paolo Pasolini
• Samuel Fuller
• Sam Peckinpah

Reforming The TV Business

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{The studios are saying} we’re gonna try to make a lot of money and we’re gonna make sure a lot of people like this show. So we have to really work hard on it all together. We all have to make every decision very carefully. What do people like? They like nice-looking people. So they grab together a bunch of unfunny nice-looking people and they take a script that’s just been worked over by so many people that nobody remembers what it was about anymore.

People watching they go this is dogshit I hate this, this isn’t interesting, or they go okay I’ll watch it if you make me, it’s on the buses and everything. People seem to watch some TV shows just because it’s like a national duty to watch some of these shows. If you take a show and you just take a guy and you go make it and the guy is willing to work for not a trillion dollars a minute, you get something interesting. One person’s voice or two people’s voices are just more interesting. ¹⁴

You’re obviously someone who pays close attention to the business part of what you do. What about the TV business most needs reforming? 

I remember when I was doing Lucky Louie, there was a show called Emily’s Reasons Why Not In a 2006 review for the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley wrote that the sitcom is “a tepid knockoff of Sex and the City” and that star Heather Graham is “about as engaging as rock salt.”. It was built on a very popular actress, and they made a bunch of episodes before airing any of them.

This is what happens a lot in television when someone has so much popularity that their agents leverage it. They say, “This person is so popular that you have to promise all these episodes — produced — and sick amounts of money no matter what happens.” That forces the studio into covering their liabilities.

And the way they do that is they send executives to the set, they pore over every script and make sure there’s nothing that could possibly upset anybody, and they make sure that it’s treacly and has lovable moments. There’s no way that process can make a good show.

Then they throw an enormous advertising-and-promotion budget at it because you forced them to spend so much fucking money. The first episode of Emily’s Reasons Why Not aired, and the next day it was gone. That’s work that nobody ever saw because the stakes became too high.

What would be a better way of doing it?

If everybody goes in and says, “Look, this probably isn’t going to work because most art isn’t good.” Even great writers usually write shit. Being a great writer means writing shitty stuff and not giving up. It doesn’t mean you just sit down and it comes out beautiful.

So you should go to the studio and say, like I did with FX and Louie, “This might not be any good. Let’s make this for as little as possible. Let’s make one and see how it goes, but if we need to, we can all walk away without any huge penalty.” The idea that we get the studios and the networks to give us money as a guarantee against failure? That’s how they negotiate now: Even if this tanks, you give me a million dollars. So it’s a system that kind of chugs along and sometimes great shows get made. ¹⁵

Anticipation and Curiosity In Fiction & TV

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It’s interesting to watch what people do right and what they do wrong. You know, as long as it’s one guy like what’s that guy gonna do next, that’s what is compelling to people. It isn’t I love that guy, that guy always does the right thing, that guy is so handsome, that guy gets all the chicks.

What makes people watch something is I wonder what that guy is gonna do, that’s what makes people watch stuff, its curiosity. That’s why reality is so big because they’re like what are these nutty people gonna do I don’t know.

Good fiction works that way too, that it makes people wonder what’s going to happen, but when you have meetings with executives they ask all those questions at the meeting and they want you to answer them on the screen.

They go I don’t understand why that’s happening, can you explain it. No, because then nobody will watch it. If there was a network note session for The Wizard of Oz, they would have said can we just tell her when she first gets there all she has to do is click her heels. ¹⁴

Sadness

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I don’t mind feeling sad. Sadness is a lucky thing to feel. I have the same amount of happy and sad as anybody else. I just don’t mind the sad part as much; it’s amazing to have those feelings. I’ve always felt that way.

I think that looking at how random and punishing life can be, it’s a privilege. There’s so much to look at, there’s so much to observe, and there’s a lot of humor in it. I’ve had sad times, I’ve had some hard times, and I have a lot of things to be sad about, but I’m pretty happy right now. ⁴

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References

1. Short Films By Louis CK, louisck.com.
2. Advice for an 18 year old aspiring comedian – Google Group.
3. Louis CK – “Hilarious” Screening Q&A at the IFC Theater in NYC 2010 – YouTube.
4. Louis C.K. Comes Clean, Rolling Stone Interview. 2013.
5. Hi I’m Louis CK and this is a thing, Reddit AMA.
6. Comedian Louis C.K. on politics, making jokes about Donald Trump, and “Horace and Pete”, Charlie Rose. 2016.
7. Louis CK honors George Carlin – YouTube.
8. Louis C.K. talks about stand-up comedy, show business, and the latest season of his television show “Louie”, Charlie Rose. 2014.
9. Comedian Louis C.K. on politics, making jokes about Donald Trump, and “Horace and Pete”, Charlie Rose. 2016.
10. Are you a healthy comedian? – Google Group.
11. Louis CK TIFF 2017 – YouTube.
12. Hi I’m Louis CK and this is a thing, Reddit AMA.
13. Louis C.K. Reveals How to Write, Direct, Edit and Star in Every Episode of a Hit Show (and Not Go Crazy) – Hollywood Reporter. 2014.
14. Louis CK and Bill Simmons BS Report – YouTube.
15. In Conversation: Louis C.K., Vulture. 2016.