If you’ve seen Louis C.K.’s HBO sitcom “Lucky Louie” or his standup special and DVD “Louis C.K.: Shameless,” you know he’s a unique guy. How odd? He’s a Boston native living in New York who’s happy the Patriots lost to the Giants in the Super Bowl.
“I really enjoyed watching that game,” C.K. says during a recent early-morning phone interview. “I love sports, and I love the stories of sports. I actually like watching the Yankees; a great team, a great, historic, awesome, classy team. They’re a great foil. The Patriots became that this year. Tom Brady is like this god to people, so watching the scrappy New York team that wasn’t supposed to be the team this year f---in’ win with great style was totally a pleasure.”
C.K. was born Louis Szekely, a Hungarian name roughly pronounced “See-kay,” and was raised in Mexico City before his family settled in Massachusetts. He opted for the simple spelling of his surname after hearing one too many comedy club hosts butcher it on stage.
The 40-year-old married father does draw from everyday life for much of his material, but make no mistake: his is not family-friendly comedy. In “Shameless,” he muses on rape (“I’m obviously not condoning rape. You should never do it. Unless you have a reason, like you want to f--- somebody and they won’t let you. What other option do you have?”), discovering a barrel of duck vaginas for sale in Chinatown (“I didn’t get any, because what if I love duck vaginas? I don’t want to find out.”) and opines that while raping a chimp is wrong, having consensual relations with the primate is just fine.
The perpetual underdog — no wonder he identified with the Giants this year — C.K will bring his “Chewed Up” standup tour to the F.M. Kirby Center in Wilkes-Barre on Friday, March 7. “Chewed Up” is also the title of a forthcoming standup DVD, filmed at a March 1 Boston show.
Not so ‘lucky’
The “Chewed Up” video will come on the heels of “Shameless,” which debuted on HBO last January and was released on DVD in June. C.K. wrote and directed the movie “Pootie Tang,” is in the recently released Martin Lawrence flick “Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins,” will star alongside Ricky Gervais in the 2008 film “This Side of the Truth” and has a new CBS sitcom sitting in limbo since the writers’ strike.
But it was “Lucky Louie,” a sitcom that was shot with three cameras before a live audience, didn’t use a laugh track and hearkened back to the classic TV comedy era of “All In The Family” that brought C.K. national acclaim. The show was canceled in 2006 partway through the season despite solid ratings, a growing fanbase and the fact that HBO had ordered a full season of episodes. It was speculated that HBO pulled the plug due to some negative critical response to the show.
“I always have half of my brain thinking about how to get back to that,” C.K. says of “Lucky Louie,” in which he played a down-on-his-luck muffler-shop worker with a wife and daughter. “I think some of it was timing issues with HBO. What a network needs a particular season is different. I remember the Trailblazers had a shot at [Michael] Jordan and didn’t pick him up. The Trailblazers said, ‘We need a center.’ That’s the feeling I get at HBO.”
Despite the inherent letdown of the cancellation, C.K. does not seem bitter.
“Things kind of happened the way I expected,” he says. “I got to do the show the way I wanted, and I knew that [would happen] because I was at HBO. My goal was to totally change the experience of watching a sitcom from what [people are] used to seeing right now. … I just wanted to go out there balls-out and make people laugh. I knew that would kind of snap some people’s heads back. I knew some people would say, ‘This is just shit,’ and they did.”
Performance pressure
With the buzz generated by “Lucky Louie” and its somewhat controversial canceling as well as “Shameless,” C.K. says he feels more pressure to give his growing standup audience its money’s worth.
“Two years ago, I was just a guy at a comedy club,” C.K. says. “People come to a club and say, ‘I wonder who’s here,’ and then it’s you. That’s very different than how it is now. ‘Lucky Louie’ didn’t make my audiences larger, but it made them all mine. ‘Shameless’ seemed to broaden the amount of people.
“Now I’m performing in theatres instead of clubs. People are paying a lot more money to see me now. I haven’t been a theatre act for a long time. I’ve trained really hard to make this tour really good. I take it really seriously.”
C.K. says he performs for an hour and 10 minutes, noting that “beyond that, it gets indulgent.”
“Also, the big goal this year was to give people a brand new show,” he explains. “People come and expect stuff from ‘Shameless,’ and if they see it they’re actually happy. But they won’t come to see me again. The point of everything is to develop. ‘Shameless’ was a point I’d reached, and I want to be better. To me, if an audience sees a special that’s really good and they buy tickets to see you and you do an hour that is totally better, you’ve done your job.”
w
go:
Who: Louis C.K.
Where: F.M. Kirby Center, 71 Public Square, Wilkes-Barre
When: Fri., March 7, 8 p.m.
Tickets: $27.50, $34.50 at box office, 570.826.1100, Ticketmaster outlets, Gallery of Sound
Info: www.louisck.com, www.kirbycenter.org
“Two years ago, I was just a guy at a comedy club. People come to a club and say, ‘I wonder who’s here,’ and then it’s you. That’s very different than how it is now.”