Lucky Duck

Talking dirty with Louis C.K.

by A.D. Amorosi

Louis C.K. was a rude, raw-knuckling standup comic before he became a writer for The Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien and The Chris Rock Show. Think that made him soft? Naw. When it came time to drop his own series, HBO's Lucky Louie, the results would be ferocious, kinetic and outlandishly funny, even uncomfortable in a laugh-out-loud fashion. Oddly enough for a cable outlet that likes airing series with Gabriel Byrne, they couldn't stick with Louie. HBO dropped it. But not before making him a standup saint and opening the door for drop-dead hilarious DVDs like his new Chewed Up. And if you think he'll do any of Chewed Up onstage at the Merriam this week, think again.

City Paper: They could renew Robert Wuhl and Mind of the Married Man but you only get one season. So who's to blame at HBO for canceling Lucky Louie?

Louis C.K.: I'll tell you something I never told anybody else. Jeffrey Burkes, a big Time/Warner executive — I got really drunk at his house and I slept with his daughter and his wife. Then I rubbed my penis on their carpet. I was lucky to get one season. Really though, television is like the weather. You catch a wave or a warm day. Robert Wuhl came in at a good time.

CP: There's no good time for Robert Wuhl.

LCK: No, he's great. Listen, it all really came down to this one guy — Chris Albrecht who ran HBO for years. I've never had a greater benefactor than he. He had longevity there that was amazing. No one in television had such. And the freedom he gave me was amazing. In one year I got a half-hour special, a pilot, an entire series with full creative control and a full hour special on the heels of getting canceled. So how bad is that? I don't look at "What happened to my second season?" I look at what I did get.

CP: No, I dig that there's a beautiful rarity about your life at HBO. I'm just confounded as to why something that was so great and that people dug ended as quickly as it did when other less-liked stuff gets to stay.

LCK: Well, they were going through changes. No one who was there then is there now. And if I got in there two seasons previously, I might still be there.

CP: Were you surprised as to how much you got away with, or did you not get away with enough?

LCK: I didn't get a line to cross over. They just gave me the freedom to do whatever I thought was funny. The only time I ever heard from HBO was when they had a good idea in which to improve the show. They fought me only once and it involved me having a different cast member. I can't say ... no, I will say. I wanted Nick Dipaulo to play my best friend. They thought I should cast somebody further from my voice since my pal Jim Norton was my neighbor on the show. They were right. I ended up with Mike Haggerty, who was great — real Chicago guy. We variety-ized the voice of the show and Nick wound up playing the super. You would've seen more of him in the second season had there been one. There were scripts. HBO even paid for them.

CP: Ever hear from any parents after you called kids assholes — congratulation or condemnation?

LCK: Nothing but thanks from parents [laughs]. Theirs is a job with a remarkable stress level that only soldiers know. And you can't walk away from it. You're up against it and can't quit. I used to fantasize that George Bush was going to just quit one day.

CP: An "I had enough of this shit"-type of deal.

LCK: Exactly. Like he was going to walk in and say, "I don't feel like doing this anymore. I'm giving it to Dick."

CP: Did either of your parents want you to take after them — become an economist like your dad or a Catholic like your mom?

LCK: I really look up to my mom, who raised us as a single parent. My dad is a very strange person and I take after him in a lot of strange ways, too. I think my mom taught me to work hard and to never look for a simple escape.

CP: When did it become readily apparent that you can make a genuine living as a writer of this stuff? Plenty of guys can do an OK job of standup. But you're able to craft it into something loquacious, bold, concise and with structure.

LCK: I was confident first doing standup — I could make people laugh, be reliable onstage and get hired. Writing is a real job, though. I don't like sitting behind a desk. What probably helped was that I made these short 16mm films on my own without anyone asking me to. They were concise and funny. And I worked hard doing them. [Late Night with Conan O'Brien] was my first writing gig. I was 25. I joined the guild and cashed a check, which was an outrageous amount of money to me. I did well and I was a consistent contributor of material and learned under Conan and Robert Smigel, who were geniuses. They taught me how to execute comedy, respect production. Be imaginative and realistic — that's what television is all about.

CP: I'm not looking for dirt unless you got some to give me: You worked for a klatch of talk show hosts. Was one harder than another? Were there common denominators other than "be funny"? What drew you to the milieu?

LCK: At the time, talk show jobs were available. They were the place to be then. Prime-time television has a molasses-slow development process. With talk shows, you have an idea and by that night it's on. You're in studio, you say, "How about this?" Someone else says, "Sure," and you're throwing it up in front of an audience. That's an amazing rush, nearly the same as standup.

CP: You're like a great blogging journalist.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

LCK: You're like the NY Post — a television tabloid, part of a national conversation. It's a cool place to be. Letterman was like signing with Yankees, a great team I revered. But I was in the back row a little bit. I wish I could do it now. I was sad and cocky about the fact that they wouldn't use my ideas all the time. But Dave personally gave me lots of shots as a standup. Since Conan was replacing Letterman, it was an intense amount of pressure. That's where I learned to love the pressure. It was fun being scrutinized and those guys were the great enablers. No nepotism or seniority issues. Chris [Rock] was the same. He was a friend who got a show and brought his pals. He used to say, "I'm no different than you. I just got the shot." The writers were an all-star team. We had a lot of success. We won Emmys, had some great parties at the beginning of each season with shrimp boats and shit.

CP: You equate success with Emmys and the shrimp boats. I like that. Not to rag, but you wrote movies with and for Rock [I Think I Love My Wife, Down to Earth]. I've liked some. You've liked some. How come nobody else liked them?

LCK: I think Chris is learning with movies. He's not afraid to try stuff. His philosophy is that he'd rather fail with his own mediocre movies and learn something than be in somebody else's mediocre movies — which is what he normally gets offered. Movies are hard — I've got a few coming this year — so that's why I stay mostly with standup.

CP: You have this thing on your show announcement that you're not repeating material from your new DVD. When comics do that, it just rips off fans. You, sir, are to be applauded.

LCK: Thanks, it's just a goal I made and stuck to. Hey, I've been doing standup for 24 years. Comedy is a very Darwinist process. All about survival. You use the cerebral cortex reptilian brain to do that. It's a high-stress thing to do. I don't fear stress due to all that I've done to get here. So your brain will give you the best tools available always — that's your best material, the stuff you do for years, the stuff that never fails. It's hard to train your brain not to go there. But the audience is expecting something. And you know you have material that's never failed. Why not use it? But that's an addiction.

CP: And you're not an addict.

LCK: Exactly. Once I hit the 20-year mark I was so sick of my old shit that I set a rule for myself not to do it. So I did an HBO thing where I emptied out the coiffeurs and set out to not perform that stuff again. Anywhere. Even in a tiny club. It's gone. Because why else would I still do this? I've gone without notice up to those last few years. Most people still don't know who I am and I'm still an unremarkable $3,000-a-week club comic [laughs]. Forget fame. I'm a very good comedian, but so what? There needs to be something more compelling. My friend Brian Fraiser said to me, "If you are the greatest whistler anyone ever saw, there's still no one who wants to hear it."

CP: You ain't whistling.

LCK: If I could do like George Carlin did, write and build materials for specials like books and then be done with them when it airs, then I've reached my goal. And if I can't, I don't deserve to do it anywhere and let's forget it. So I invite disaster.

Louis C.K. | Sat., Feb. 21, 8 p.m., $30-$40, Merriam Theater, 250 S. Broad St., 215-732-5446, merriamtheater.org