TV Series: Louie

Remember The Office, particularly the British version with Ricky Gervais? Everything that came out of his mouth was squirmingly uncomfortable.

Netflix has a lot of TV series I've never heard of, including "Louie" which stars standup comedian Louis C.K. as a standup comedian, living in NYC with a kinda shitty life. Everything he says or does is squirmingly uncomfortable. He's divorced, and totally torpedoes every date he goes on. He has a gay friend, and makes him extremely uncomfortable by talking about the worst gay stereotypes. He offends everyone, and tells jokes that no sane person would say out loud in public.

I don't know how many episodes I'll be able to sit through, but it's actually kind of fun, like watching a car crash. No, a bus crash -- full of schoolchildren. No, full of Catholic high school girls -- with no underpants.

I think Ricky Gervais is one of the funniest men alive. Love his stuff. Except for The Office. The show depended on too many British references that I didn't get.

Louis C.K. Is another very funny guy, but I was disappointed in that show. I just didn't find it funny. Only time I've seen him that he didn't make me laugh out loud.

I don't think the show is intended to be "funny" any more than The Office was. It's ironic, it's supposed to make you uncomfortable, it breaks down unspoken barriers by confronting them head-on.

Maybe make you feel better about your own screwed up life by watching somebody else make a total muck-up of theirs.

I generally have a soft spot for convention-busting comedy -- Eddie Murphy's "Raw," Stephen Wright, Emo Philips, Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Handler. But it's a delicate dance, it can very quickly turn into obscenity for obscenity's sake, or being disgusting for shock value. There's a difference -- and not every comic (including the above) gets the balance right every time.
"I love to go to the park and watch the kids running around... 'cause they don't know I'm using blanks."
Garden path sentences
Paraprosdokian

Louis C.K. I'm still trying to figure out if he's got it or not. I'm repulsed.... but in a GOOD way...

Paraprosdokian is a good example of what makes good comedy, at least in my opinion. The unexpected closing can make for hilarious comedy.

In the case of the Louis C.K. program, there is none of that and I found the humor to be juvenile. I don't mind if "blue" language is used, but it should be a helping component of the humor - not the basis of it. Little kids really like fart jokes, but older people have already heard them all.

Look at George Carlin, Richard Pryor, even Bob Newhart: they used the unexpected to great success,

_Howard wrote:

Little kids really like fart jokes, but older people have already heard them all.

http://uproxx.com/tv/2011/06/louis-c-k-why-farts-are-funny/

Quote :

Kurt Vonnegut thought so. Here's an excerpt from his novel Galapagos, where he talks about the future of human evolution, after a disease forces us to abandon land and basically become seals:

Kurt Vonnegut wrote:

People still get the hiccups, incidentally. They still have no control over whether they do it or not. I often hear them hiccuping, involuntarily closing their glotises and inhaling spasmodically, as they lie on the broad white beaches or paddle around the blue lagoons. If anything, people hiccup more now than they did a millions years ago. This has less to do with evolution, I think, than the fact that so many of them gulp down raw fish without chewing them up sufficiently. And people still laugh as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains. If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts, everybody laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago.

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