Louis CK Did A Surprise Set At Comedy Cellar Last Night - People Were Mad!
NY TIMES – Louis C.K. made an unannounced appearance at the Comedy Cellar on Sunday night, according to the club’s owner, performing for apparently the first time since he admitted last year to sexual misconduct with women in the comedy world.
He appeared around 11 p.m., said Noam Dworman, the owner of the Cellar, the Greenwich Village club with a long tradition of surprise appearances by famous comedians. Dressed in a black V-neck T-shirt and gray pants, he did a 15-minute set that touched on what Mr. Dworman called “typical Louis C.K. stuff” — racism, waitresses’ tips, parades. “It sounded just like he was trying to work out some new material, almost like any time of the last 10 years he would come in at the beginning of a new act.”
Mo Amer, another comic who was on the bill Sunday, said that for the crowd, “it was like a wow moment.” He, too, said he had no idea that Louis C.K. would return that night but that his material was “like, classic Louis, really really good.”
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So Louis made his return to comedy last night in a surprise set at Comedy Cellar, which the owner didn’t tell anybody about. From all accounts he was funny and stuck to his usual shtick and was “classic Louis.” He even got a standing O when he came out on stage.
Mr. Dworman said Louis C.K. “was very relaxed,” and the audience, a sold-out crowd of about 115, greeted him warmly, with an ovation even before he began. (Mr. Dworman was at home asleep, but club staff texted him about the appearance, and he later watched a tape of it, he said.)
Which, as you could have predicted – didn’t sit well with the general public.
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(Literally not a single person in America had a caring thought about Brock Turner.)
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A lot of people are mad at the club owner for sanctioning it, and even more mad at his comments that “people should be able to decide for themselves” while not actually telling them he was coming so they could form a decision. A fair enough point. However, they do have the ability to stand up and walk out at any time – a move that I would think was more powerful and a bigger statement than just never showing up in the first place. If you wanted to punish Louis, as I’ve learned from Francis, there’s no worse feeling for a standup than watching people stand up and walk out in the middle of your show. THAT’S a feeling a lot of Louis haters would salivate for.
This is what the owner had to say about that:
Mr. Dworman said that as a business owner, he was in a difficult position. “I understand that some people will be upset with me. I care about my customers very much. Every complaint goes through me like a knife. And I care about doing the right thing.”
But, he added, “there can’t be a permanent life sentence on someone who does something wrong.” The social standards about how to respond to errant behavior are inconsistent, he said, and now shifting ever faster, and audiences should have the leeway to decide what to watch themselves. “I think we’ll be better off as a society if we stop looking to the bottlenecks of distribution — Twitter, Netflix, Facebook or comedy clubs — to filter the world for us.”
Francis will have a more thoughtful, drawn out piece about the situation later on. For now if you are very Mad Online about this you can just scroll through “Louis CK’ on Twitter and find plenty of people to rage with.