Louie Louie

>>Louis CK on late-night television, surviving
a Barbara Walters’ attack and the mysterious
HBO cancellation of his acclaimed sitcom

by CHRIS BARRY

Over the years, he’s written for Letterman, Late Night With Conan O’Brien, and snagged an Emmy for his work on The Chris Rock Show. His own HBO sitcom, Lucky Louie, had been both a critical and ratings favourite before mysteriously finding itself cancelled last year after only one brief season. But Louis CK ain’t fazed. His stand-up routine is packing them in like never before, and the critical accolades for his insightful brand of abrasive comedy keep pouring in. Louis CK has become a bona fide star. The Mirror caught up with him last week.

Mirror: So you’re not writing for late-night TV anymore. Did you just grow tired of it?

Louis CK: Well, it’s very much a young fella’s game, and after a while you want to do something deeper than all these one-off jokes on the events of the day. You get tired of having to know everything that’s going on in the news. There are so many big stars out there I’ve no idea about. Like Sienna Miller. I don’t even know who that is. There are so many names like that. I don’t need to know who these people are or what they did and that makes me happy.

M: Was the money any good?

LCK: For late-night television? It’s not bad. It’s usually a pretty good leap from what you were doing before. I think my first salary was, like, $1,500 a week, which was awesome. And I think I left Conan at $2,600 a week. It was good money, plus all the benefits and stuff. They take care of writers.

Battling Barbara

M: When you appeared on The View last year, were you at all taken aback by Barbara Walters’ apparent outrage over what she considered to be the vulgar, racist content of Lucky Louie?

LCK: It surprised me because I was invited on in a very friendly manner and then they told me, you know, one minute before the show started, that she was going to attack me. So it was a little unfair. But I think she was only pretending to be offended by the show to create some kind of fake controversy. They kept referring to Lucky Louie as something that had launched this “firestorm of controversy,” and we’d only been on the air for, like, a few days, and nobody had said anything. It was just silly and hollow to me—fake. Barbara Walters is a product of the ’70s, there’s no way she could be offended by that show. And if she was, who cares? She’s the last person in the world I care about keeping happy. Anybody who calls the show racist is just a dolt. There’s nothing racist on the show, it’s a show that explores race. Anybody who thinks it’s racist has race issues of their own. But what are you going to do? Anyway, it’s interesting to kick shit up and see what people react to. Lucky Louie was an interesting social experiment.

M: Yeah, how so?

LCK: We did things sitcoms hadn’t done before, and some people just went, “No, that’s not how you do it, you can only do these clever, quippy jokes.” If you ever read those magazines that, for whatever goddamned reason, quote their favourite sitcom moments—Entertainment Weekly does this—the ones that always get in are the sitcoms that refer to other sitcoms. Like, you know, it’ll be some guy from Old Christine [Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s new sitcom] saying, “What am I—in Will and Grace?” Stuff like that. I mean, that’s what people like to do now, just make references and talk about Paris Hilton—even in their sitcoms. People can’t get enough of this in their shitty talk shows, they want their sitcoms to make fun of popular culture too. That’s what we’re used to. So, when we did this show that was very sincere, very basic, like, “this is how stupid sex feels,” “this is how dumb white people are around black people,” “this is how embarrassing having children is,” people kept looking for the meta-joke but it wasn’t there. We were just exploring fun issues with good actors and characters in front of an audience, that’s all.

HBO NO-GO

M: I don’t understand why HBO canned it.

LCK: I dunno, HBO had their reasons. They never explained much of it to me. We had good ratings. They went up every week. It was a very difficult thing for me to cope with. It was very sad. Very sad. What happens a lot is people say they want something edgy and different, but then when the rubber hits the road and they really see what that means, they say, “Oh my God no! We didn’t mean this!”

LOUIS CK PERFORMS AT CLUB SODA
(1225 ST-LAURENT), THURSDAY, JULY
19, 11:59 P.M. FOR MORE INFO, SEE:
WWW.HAHAHA.COM