We rejoiced to see this yesterday, a warm spring night in an empty house with the doors open and this crackling man letting loose on TV about witches, rat sex and two babies on a plane - among the most memorable moments. I was filled with appreciation of him again.
Louis CK in top form means a sage of sorts gets up on stage to expound a hilarious dharma. What is life? It's putting food in here, sh- tting out the other end. What is being a grown man? It's thinking there's a witch in the kitchen, it's calling 911 to get a bat out of your house.
This is one thing I like about him, he doesn't only crack wise, he cracks things wisely. This is in the way he presents and surrounds a self in the narration, so not an intellectual - Senfield - smugly pointing at human fallacy from above but someone for whom life is a joke that happens to, makes himself to be disgusting for us, becomes the guy afraid of a bat, tiredness is there, exasperation, all with self-effacing like an 18 year old mystified to be 40 with kids.
And he's a jazzist of narration. Humor works in profound ways so much akin to illogical jazz. It's all about surprise, dismantling, abrupt leaps in narrative, rearranging walls so you can find unexpected openings to views. Making reality fluid again. Laughter cleanses of course but even a fart joke can do some of these things. The other night I was regaled with Julianne Moore farting in the bathroom in Maps to the Stars, the whole amusement was this unexpected view.
Louis' scatological outbursts, some of them work for me, some don't. It's all part of the after-school reality he creates in which he can fret about grownup stuff. His ability though to wander visually in the space of narration just explodes in this show - he conjures crows flying while he cums, an old crone cackling some omen about the baby to be born - it's all we have just said about abrupt leaps done like a master editor splices views. It's not some perfection of what he does as much as portals it opens.
