Nine years after releasing Louis C.K.: 2017, the comedian is back on Netflix with his 11th hour special (make it a dirty dozen if you count his 2023″Back to the Garden” livestream as separate from his similar 2023 release, At The Dolby). Is is a triumphant return? What would a triumphant return even look like?
The Gist: Louis C.K. has won six Emmys, three Grammys, and three Peabody Awards, and changed the way comedians could do show business in both stand-up and television. So why hasn’t he been on Netflix since 2017? Oh, yeah. Right. I’ve covered C.K. since his Lucky Louie days, and tried to encapsulate the ridiculousness of it all earlier this year when Netflix announced it had gotten back into business with the comedian for this new special and booked him at the Hollywood Bowl for this year’s Netflix Is A Joke festival.
What Comedy Special Will It Remind You Of? Whether or not you can separate the art from the artist, or if you especially cannot, then this new hour actually may remind you of some of his early stand-up, before he became famous and then infamous.
Memorable Jokes: Finding out this week that a famous former child star died of AIDS makes CK’s opening bit hit a bit differently. “I just wanted some good news,” CK jokes. Indeed.
The first half of hour follows him on an absurd stream of conscious following taboos, from dreams where he might be muttering racism or “peeing on a baby,” to finding similarities between the sun and vaginas (they’re both a source of joy and life, “but don’t look at it,” he cracks), to forcing the audience to imagine him engaging in crude sexual acts with his mom (now dead) and dad (not quite dead, but 89). He pivots into more realistic, if deliberately more depressing detail about the process of him and his siblings putting their father into assisted living so they don’t have to deal with him any longer.
In other musings, he wonders why torturers don’t just go straight for the balls, he finds joy in both freezing rain and in boneless skinless chicken breasts (for different reasons), he hates how strangers will walk up to you when you’re walking your dog, and as he nears the half-hour mark of his special, he even trots out an interactive “I am so old” series of jokes.
Our Take: Although he puts a bizarre spin on the whole thing, not just by how the jokes play out, but also beforehand by how he has to explain to the audience how he wants them to respond whenever he says, “I am so old…” Which you could try to defend by believing his over-explaining enhances the payoff. The sadder more likely truth is that he found enough audiences on the road who simply needed to be coached into the old saw of a “How ___ are you?” response.
If you go way back to when he wasn’t old at all, you’d find that his joke-writing then isn’t all that different from how it is now: Crude, silly, and slightly unexpected, delighting in taboo topics.
Only now it’s a bit more difficult to indulge him in his taboos when the only taboo he seemingly won’t touch is the one in which he comes clean about his own character defects. Sure, he has joked so so much over the years about his masturbation habits and perversions, and yet when he did dance around how those perversions lost him both status and income, he made himself somehow still sound somewhat innocent. Which makes closing with a bit about Barely Legal magazine in 2026 quite a choice. And it makes his suggestion of countering strangers who approach his dog with him approaching families by asking “Is that your daughter? Did she have her period yet?” less humorous and more straight-up deranged. Which he could’ve played off by tagging those lines with some jokes about just how deranged that would be coming from.
Instead, we’re left with reading between the lines to see where and when CK is trying to tell on himself without telling on himself.
There’s after joking about how his father may have done “one good thing,” where he suggests: “That’s … the way I look at life is, if somebody does one good thing for me, I keep that. Anything else they did, I can, I can let that go.” Let go of the bad things someone has done if you can think of one good thing they’ve done? You don’t say?
Later, he suggests this about listening to others:“It means hearing something you don’t want to f—-in’ hear at all. But you pretend to give a s–t. Pretending is an important part of life, I think. You know? I think the truth is important, but lying is important.” He doubles down on lying by joking about the concept of taking an oath in court to tell the truth when anyone who’s guilty won’t ever cop to their crimes for fear of consequences. You don’t say?
And then finally, considering this whole hour is presumably about CK confronting old age both through his parents facing mortality, and the comedian himself approaching 60, he says this about the irony of wisdom in aging: “Cause people don’t get where they’re at ’til later. That’s how life is. Life teaches you how you should have lived it. But you can’t use the information. You get to the end of your life and you’re like, that would’ve been good to know a lot of those things, but it’s too late.”
Thing is, Louis. It’s not too late. You can use the information you’ve learned to live better with the time you have now. To joke better. To treat others better. To win back former fans. There’s still time.
Our Call: Did you want to imagine the 58-year-old comedian getting molested by his elderly father? Congrats! This special is for you. At this point, at least, this hour of comedy isn’t going to change anyone’s minds about him. If you never stopped loving Louis C.K., then you’re going to STREAM IT. If you’re on the fence or jumped off the bandwagon a decade ago, SKIP IT and wait to see what he has to say next.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.