Recall the early days of #MeToo: the excitement, the promise, the sense of a tectonic shift reshaping the culture from the roots. There was a time, in the movement’s first fecund months, when powerful men were falling like dominos. It felt, then, like sweeping social change was finally here to stay — and like cancellation might actually be forever. Scalps were being collected, careers were being blown to smithereens, and the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, finally held to account for a lifetime of bad acts, were banished at last. If they weren’t locked in a literal prison, they were at least locked out of polite society by the newly empowered activists who now guarded every door and held every key.
In all this, the fall of filmmaker and comedian Louis CK was a blockbuster moment. The comedian’s predilection for masturbating in front of his peers had been an open secret for ages. But now the tide seemed to be turning. A massive story in the New York Times alleged that he had harassed five women, most of them fellow comedians, in the early 2000s. The response was outrage, and more importantly, consequences: Louis CK confessed, apologised, and dutifully vanished from public life for nearly a year.
“These stories are true,” the comedian acknowledged in a statement. “At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question.”
The damage was not just reputational. It was quantifiable. His new movie, I Love You, Daddy, was abruptly shelved, never to be released. His management company cut him loose; his contracts with FX and TBS were cancelled; his past work was pulled from streaming services. Forbes estimated that the comedian’s immediate losses counted in the tens of millions. And that was before you counted all the income he’d never make now that, as the writer boldly predicted, his career was permanent toast.
It was enough to make even the most coolheaded feminist start to imagine a time, surely not too far off, when the movement would rise to absolute power and the patriarchy would lie in ruins. But this week, Louis CK punched a Grammy-shaped hole right through that little fantasy, by winning the music industry’s biggest award for Best Comedy Album. “Sincerely Louis CK” was the comedian’s first release since 2017, when the story of his sexual misconduct broke.
At the time of its release, the reaction to the new special was as much a microcosm for the divide between elite tastemakers and ordinary consumers as it was a response to the content itself. Critics mainly complained that Louis CK didn’t do enough to address and apologise for his inappropriate behaviour, while those who bought the album mainly laughed until they couldn’t breathe — a reaction for which they, too, were mercilessly indicted. (Slate’s review of the special scolded that these jokes might have been funny if told by a less repulsive entertainer to a less repulsive audience, before condemning both Louis CK and his fans in a single breath: “Everyone involved in that transaction deserves one another.”) At the time of writing, the show’s Rotten Tomatoes rating from viewers is a stellar 93%.
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