The Comedy of Truth Telling: Louis C. K.'s Louie and Simon Amstell's Grandma's House

Preface: Very seriously, if you don't like spoilers, don't read any of this blog post, which contains MAJOR SPOILERS for events old and new on all three sitcoms it discusses: Louie, Grandma's House, and Peep Show. The kind of spoilers that dwell on the profound televisual pleasure of the skillful revelation of surprises, ruining them for you in the process. So do not read on unless you've already seen these shows and want to compare reactions, or you like to read blog posts about TV shows you'll never watch, or on an impulse that you'll regret immediately after, cringing at each MAJOR SPOILER that erupts in your face.

For two comedians so drastically different, Louis C. K. and Simon Amstell have a remarkable amount in common. They both star in artistically ambitious, autobiographical sitcoms of the “comedy of humiliation/discomfort” sub-genre, playing less successful versions of themselves who are awkward, vulnerable, and have a difficult time finding love and getting laid. Both men have Jewish ancestry on the paternal side; C. K.'s parents divorced when he was ten, Amstell's when he wasn't much older; both shows are haunted by paternal absence. The strong autobiographical element in their comedy goes along with a broader concern with truth telling: Amstell became a minor celebrity in the UK by mocking celebrities, first as a presenter on Pop World, then as the host of the pop music-oriented quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, while (to judge by the bits featured on the show) C. K. prides himself in his stand-up comedy on telling uncomfortable truths which often have to do with sex.

But that's where the similarities end. C. K. is an out-of-shape man in his early 40s who's obsessed with the idea that he's decrepit; Amstell is a wisp of a waif in his early 30s who's as fat-phobic as C. K. is food-addicted and who frequently remarks on the youthfulness of his own appearance. When in Season 3 of Louie, Louie confronts the idea of failure, it's as a middle-aged man whose aim, given his career in show business, has always been to become a stupendous success, and who has started to realize that it may not happen, and soon his best years will be behind him and he will have no more opportunities. When in Series 2 of Grandma's House, Simon grows more desperate after giving up his TV host job, it's as a once-precocious success who thinks his best years may already be irretrievably behind him even as he watches his peers, such as the oft-mentioned Russell Brand, take their careers to “the next level.” It's important to the comedy of both men that we believe they're too prickly, insular, hapless, and, of course, honest for mass popularity; but in truth there's no inevitability to these things. Before Forgetting Sarah Marshall, only five years ago, it might have seemed that Russell Brand was too edgy and outspoken to make it in America; and (being Russell Brand's age) I'm old enough to remember when David Letterman, then in his mid-40s, was being considered as Johnny Carson's replacement, and everyone thought he was too edgy – in his case, acerbic and facetious – for the position. Edginess and awkwardness may reduce your chances of success in entertainment, but they doesn't preclude the possibility.

One of the most obvious differences between the two men is that C. K. is heterosexual and Amstell homosexual, which in their case affects not just their sexual preferences but their stance towards masculinity. C. K. struggles with what it means to “be a man”: fear of fighting and whether that compromises his masculinity; shame over his “disgusting” fantasies about women; a mixture of shame and defiant pride over his masturbation addiction; nervous mockery and jittery tolerance of male homosexuality, accompanied by homophobic/homoerotic fantasies (e.g., the denouement of the dentist episode). Amstell, on the other hand, seems as far from wanting to approximate traditional masculinity as he's incapable of doing so, with his adolescent appearance and voice; in Grandma's House the only function that traditional masculinity serves is to be mocked as absurd in the form of Simon's mother's boyfriend, Clive, an erratic alcoholic who calls Simon “Captain” and whose blustery attempts to engage in male bonding with his amused and horrified pseudo-stepson tend to evoke pity and fear.

The Trouble with Truth Telling

An unfortunate aspect of Amstell's truth-telling persona is his nastiness towards those he deems deserving, whether celebrities or relatives; although in Grandma's House this is tempered by self-deprecation, on the one hand, and intermittent compassion towards most of the other main characters, Clive included. An unfortunate aspect of C. K.'s truth-telling is that he seems to think that he's speaking for “men” and hides behind this idea when he tells us unsavoury truths about himself, such as about his sexual thoughts and habits. The same can't be said of Amstell: when in his stand-up show, Do Nothing, he tells us about his attraction to young men who are thin and vulnerable, like himself, he's not talking about anyone else's foibles but his own, and one is astonished, as throughout the show, equally at his confessional bravery and his infinite narcissism.

This willingness to speak on behalf of “men” is no doubt a large part of the reason that C. K. has been embraced as philosopher-comedian, appealing to the same middle-aged white male demographic, confused and disoriented in a world that is no longer theirs even though it still pretty much is, for whom Walter White is a badass. C. K.'s weird, prematurely-curmudgeonly, anti-modern world stance must also have something to do with it, as well as his absolute confidence in the familiar fallacy that if he thinks something, and it's unpleasant, it must be true. The nadir of this attitude is on display in an early episode in which he asserts that lesbianism is wrong “not ethically, but geometrically,” a repetition of the stale sexist idea that “it can't be sex if there's no penis involved,” and therefore lesbianism is neither harmful nor serious. Those silly girls can do what they want to because nothing real can happen until men are involved; and if you find that offensive, it must mean it's true, and not a culturally dominant prejudice that denies the truth of another person's experience.

A World Populated by Psychopaths

In a way, Louie has more interesting things to say about 21^st century masculinity than more progressive sitcoms like Grandma's House or Jonathan Ames's on Bored to Death, which is a kind of post-masculinity buddy-comedy. Louie doesn't get the kind of firm, clear exemption from masculinity of an Amstell or Jason Schwartzman, baby-faced men whose adolescence has wondrously survived into their early 30s. He's a farting-and-masturbating “regular guy” who's nevertheless as neurotic and anxious as Woody Allen (although by Season 3 he's become almost as inarticulate as Jerry Lewis); whose “ordinary” appearance is brutally criticized throughout the series, mostly by men; and whose pathological relationship with food would appall Bridget Jones.

 

A more troubling aspect of C. K.'s comedic persona on Louie is the fact that he is almost always presented as a sane man surrounded by psychopaths, albeit a sane man with a binge-eating disorder and, quite possibly, clinical depression. That would be enough to make you a freak on most shows, but it's nothing compared to the eccentric, hysterical women he encounters in personal situations (dates, sisters, mother) and the strange men who put him and others in dangerous situations. Louie the character and Louis the writer rarely make any attempt to find out what is making these people act in the strange ways they do: why the woman who approached him for sex after the PTA wants him to buy her blueberries and spank her in bed and why the spanking makes her break down in sobs of despair; why the bus driver doesn't know where the field trip is, how to get there, or the regulations about taking buses on highways. Once these people have confirmed for Louie, once again, that the world is an insane and scary place, nothing more is needed from them. Sometimes the dynamic flips, in the episodes where Louie goes into a panic that turns out to be unjustified; then he is blindly hysterical, with the difference that we know the cause, and it's a good one. This does happen with another character in the show, once: the teenage bully who threatens to kick the shit out of Louie in front of his date, whom he then stalks to his house, where he confronts the boy's father and discovers that both of his parents are physically and verbally abusive. This of course ends up feeling a little like an after-school special, but if C. K. is so drawn to unhappy eccentrics and extreme situations, he might try a little more often, Cassavetes-style, to help us understand these characters and feel something for them. One of my favourite episodes is the one where a fellow comic that Louie's known for years, but not very well, chooses him as the person he's going to say goodbye to before committing suicide because his life is empty, facing the viewer with the question of whether this is always a stupid decision, sometimes a sensible one, or simply a personal one.

While I watched the first two seasons of Louie with half-interest and occasional detached admiration, for me Season 3 is the big pay-off, where Louie and the show together try to push beyond their boundaries. Season 3 contains not one but two inspirational plotlines, although they're only “inspirational” within the context of the show's dark universe. First, Louie finds a new woman to obsess over in the form of Parker Posey's bookstore clerk, who agrees to go on a date with him, during which she reveals herself to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, pushing him to try things and do things he wouldn't normally do, to make the effort to enjoy life while you can. And then the season settles into its major arc: Louie's attempt to “get in training” for taking over Letterman's job on The Late Show. Fighting his own terror of failure, which manifests itself as a horror of effort, and his settled, comfortable conviction that he's a niche comic who can't entertain the mass audience, he pulls it together in order to be a role model for his little girls and show them that if you want something, you have to try. The more layers of cynicism and self-doubt that Louie strips away, the more vulnerable he becomes, and as he allows himself to want the job and believe in himself it's hard not to root for the underdog. He isn't allowed to get what he wants, or it wouldn't be Louie, but his triumph is that he thought he could, and knows he could have.

And then in the final episode, Parker Posey briefly reappears and we learn the reason for her sudden melancholy at the end of the date episode, while she was sitting, exhilarated, on the edge of a high rise roof; and that she was not a Manic Pixie Dream (or Nightmare) Girl after all, but Milly Theale. Like the Letterman opportunity, she, too, taught Louie to be a little less afraid of life; and she's denied to him even more brutally. In Season 3 of Louie, the world is perhaps even more insane and scary than ever, but Louie has somehow found the inner resources, and outer motivation, to take some risks, and C. K. shows the real difficulties and rewards of opening yourself up to possibility despite fear and pain.

Do Not Go Gently Into the Post-Masculine Era

Something similar happened to the protagonist of Peep Show, Mark Corrigan (David Mitchell), in the initial Series 7 of Peep Show, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's point-of-view-cam sitcom, with voice-over access to the thoughts of Mark and deuteragonist Jeremy (Robert Webb), a couple of hopeless losers, Mark an anti-charismatic nerd and Jeremy a vaguely charismatic, irresponsible, unemployable mooch. Before I saw Louie, I thought Peep Show was the darkest sitcom I'd ever seen, with the most excruciatingly humiliating and generally horrifying situations. The first four seasons focus on Mark's seemingly hopeless obsession with his co-worker, Sophie, first leading the viewer to sympathize with and root for Mark despite his frequent ineptitude, then making us realize, with delicious dawning horror, that Mark is incapable of a functioning romantic relationship, never really wanted Sophie in the first place, and has fucked up her life by winning her over.

Armstrong and Bain then take us through the revelation of Mark's true, but involuntary, awfulness and manage to bring us around almost to sympathizing with him again as he keeps fucking up on Sophie and adding to her hatred of him. When Mark gets a crush on a new co-worker, a cute, funny nerd girl, we're relieved that it seems as though something is finally going to go right for him, and at the end of Series 7 it looked like he might be ready and able to take baby steps towards “growing up” by kicking Jez out and moving in with a completely awesome woman.

If Peep Show had ended with Series 4, it would have been a masterpiece. Series 7 doesn't add much to the proceedings, instead drawing out the question of whether Mark's “growth” will prove illusory and Dobby will turn out to be Sophie II, which no longer has the ability to surprise, or whether this time he won't screw it up, in which case Mark and Jeremy split up and the show has to end. Peep Show has gone into a soap-opera holding pattern and could go on this way for years with ever-diminishing returns. Grandma's House, on the other hand, is over too soon after only two series: proving true to his perfectionist and somewhat antagonist stance, Amstell has said that he likes to end things once they're good and while they're still liked. As for Louie – isn't he, too, going to have to get the girl and start getting his life together (if they're not equated) at some point, and won't that be the end of the show? Mark's emotional trajectory with Sophie makes perfect sense for Louie as well, but I'm not sure if C. K. hates him enough to tarnish the beauty of his wistful, delusional feelings for women he can't have. Louie's self-loathing is always on the border of self-pity, which is a frequent difference between British and American dark comedy, and which is something else that Louie has in common with Walter White. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, ageing white dudes. Or whimper, whichever. 

Notes on Hipsterism, Loser Culture, the New Failure Focus, and the Mysteriously Enduring Popularity of the Hardboiled Detective

It turns out I can't make the artificial distinction between pop culture, literature and amateur sociology. But I'll tie it into literature by the end of the post and also, I'm sure, in future posts.

A Loser, Baby

As an idle zeitgeist-watcher, I've developed over the years a theory of how slackers became losers, on the one hand, and hipsters, on the other. You remember "slackers," that censorious boomer term for people in their early 20s, who, it was thought, had no ambition or work ethic. Its introduction to late 20th century pop culture was accomplished, as far as I know, by the 1991 Richard Linklater film Slacker, and the same period, the early 90s, also saw the introduction of the term "loser" into pop culture, with Radiohead's "Creep" ("I'm a creep, I'm a loser / What the hell am I doing here? / I don't belong here") and Beck's "Loser" ("I'm a loser, baby / So why don't you kill me"). Between them, the two songs, ubiquitous on the radio throughout the 90s, heralded, with Nirvana, a new era of depressive, self-deprecating youth, whether you were emo (also known as "what people with no sense of humour thought The Smiths were") or a hipster, two strains of youth culture best characterized by their relationship to irony (total absence or total saturation).

I was in my late teens (sixteen and on) when all of this happened, and I remember being insulted by the term "slacker" even though I wasn't one of the twentysomethings being implicated: it still seemed like the old people were unfairly branding my generation. I don't recall noticing the Radiohead or Beck songs until the late 90s, though, when I was approaching my mid-20s and getting divorced. Maybe it was because they spoke to me then (I was also going through career failure), or maybe it took me so long to notice them because I never listened to pop stations and rarely watched MTV. The sentiments of "Creep" repulsed me, while "Loser" made me laugh. I did, however, like Radiohead's "Just," which was as masochistic as "Creep" but more vigorous. Anger works when humour fails.

Loser TV

The loser appeared on TV a little ahead of his pop music emergence, in the person of George Costanza on Seinfeld. No one had ever seen anything like George before: physically unremarkable (balding, short, tubby), mentally unremarkable, neurotic, browbeaten by his parents, unable to hold down a job. George was a born loser with self-sabotage added for good measure, and no one had seen a TV character like this before, someone you couldn't either identify with as a fantasy or look down on and laugh at. Instead, you looked down on George and identified with him at the same time.

Loser TV flourished in the UK as well, initially with the series Black Books (2000-2004), with the loser mantle taken up by Peep Show (2003-present). Black Books, created by and starring Dylan Moran, centered on the misanthropic, chainsmoking-and-wine drinking Bernard Black, owner of a tiny bookshop, his flunky Manny (the tricky slave to his senex iratus, in Frygian terms: from Fawlty Towers on, British sitcoms like to stay close to the classic template), and their neurotic friend Fran. As if their (unusual) interest in books disqualifies them for reality, not one of the main characters is capable of real work (the bookshop itself doesn't count) or a relationship, and Bernard and Fran constantly engage in the un-p.c. self-destructive behaviours of smoking and drinking. Fran is a Bernard who guiltily tries to better herself, but by the third and last season she has all but given up and accepted that she is just as unfit for normal life as Bernard. In the characterization of her college friends from the climax of her character trajectory, the devastating episode "Elephants and Hens" from season three, Fran is a "crazy spinster" only fit to hang out with the bookshop "freaks."

Whereas Black Books seemed to express the personal vision of its creator (namely, that the modern world wasn't worth living in and it was much better to hole up with a book, cigarettes and wine), Peep Show seems more like a generational commentary. Mark and Jez are odd couple roomies in their thirties: Mark the uptight nerd and Jez the laidback slacker. Despite being opposites, however, they're united in their complete lack of equipment for success by the same old standards of measurement: career, money, relationships, raising a family. Between the two of them, they can just about manage work and sex respectively, though not very well. Mark can hold down a dull office job and takes work seriously enough to want to get ahead in it, but unfortunately he has no talent, and when by a miracle he does start to rise, he naturally screws it up. Jez has nothing but scorn for the "straight" world of work, thinking he's going to make it as a musician, but he, too, is hampered by lack of any talent. Although Mark seems comparatively "mature," in fact both are boys, curiously stunted in the development of their life skills and emotions, and their growing co-dependency (as in Black Books) makes it worse. As the series progresses, viewers watch and wait for time to take its course as the characters get older without getting ahead and grow more desperate all the time.

Peep Show maybe proves that you don't have to be a bohemian with acute mental illness to be desperate. It's enough to be an ordinary person unable to figure out (or, deep down, to care) how a dull life works in a culture obsessed with youth, so that you go from being young and carefree to being a pathetic loser by exhibiting the same behaviours and maintaining the same level of success in your thirties (and forties, and fifties) as in your twenties. Turning thirty (the age of the fictional Jonathan Ames in Bored to Death) seems to be the gunshot that starts the race, after which every second that passes without accomplishment decreases your social status and increases your existential desperation. Like the gunshot of turning twenty for an unmarried Jane Austen heroine.

The Loser and the Recession

The mighty Curb Your Enthusiasm, starring the real George Constanza, debuted the same year as Black Books. Trust the Irish and the Jews to know a thing or two about losing. I have to admit I've never watched more CYE than a few seconds of the first episode, so sick was I of the Seinfeld hype by that time, and also going through a period (my entire twenties) where I "didn't watch TV" (meaning I watched very little, mainly Buffy), until the advent of DVD availability and the HBO and Showtime era seduced me back (so now I watch a little more). Nevertheless, in my casual, totally subjective overview, if the 90s introduced the concept of the loser as a pop culture identification figure, the concept truly flourished in the 2000s, after which it may have gradually fizzled out if it weren't for one thing: the recession.

The global recession of 2007 gave the loser a new lease on life and retroactively justified the slacker attitude. Once, young people rejected their boomer parents' materialism; now, we discovered we would never get ahead if we tried. Once, we refused to mature and become bourgeois; now, we discovered that the social symbols of maturity (house, car, family, career advancement.... leaving your parents' house) would either be unavailable to us or come very late. Once we thought we might like to live like bohemians not only in our twenties (which still gives you time to become bourgeois on schedule) but into our thirties; now we learned that we could be living that way into our forties, or fifties... or permanently.

The Loser and the Hipster

At exactly what point did the defining term for the post-boomer generation change from "slacker" to "hipster"? As notoriously elusive as Sontag's camp, the condition of being a hipster is defined both against mainstream culture (the trash culture celebrated by reality TV) and bourgeois culture (i.e. corporate culture, whose promises of success for the individual are ever-decreasing since the recession).  The hipster was consolidated as a cultural figure by the time of the publication of Christian Lander's Stuff White People Like in book form in early 2008, although Lander participated in a common confusion by making "white people" (i.e., hipsters) refer to both the new, young, post-boomer middle class in their thirties who have disposable income to spend on consumer products geared towards bourgeois bohemians; and what he calls the "poor by choice," namely arts grad students, who will for the rest of their lives exhibit a comical disparity between their overeducated snob tastes and their poverty. But although the media has tried to account for low-income hipsters by pointing to the glutting of urban centres by the sons and daughters of the middle class, you don't, in fact, need either to live in a major urban centre or (contra Lander) have a university education to be a hipster. If you were anywhere between six and forty when indie music crossed over into the mainstream in the early 90s or have passed through adolescence since that event, you, too, had the option of becoming a hipster without ever going anywhere near a university. Really, hipster taste is just urban taste, and in the era of global marketing and the internet, nothing is easier than to acquire urban taste even when you're miles from a major urban centre.

In recessionary pop culture, the hipster and the loser dance around each other without completely coinciding. The recession and its economic fallout have confirmed that post-boomers are losers, and hipsterism is the most recognizable form of post-boomer youth culture, and, like the also urban dandyism of the latter 19th century, can be supported even without any income, because its focus is taste, not property - a superior state of being rather than a superior state of having. But you can also be a hipster without being a loser and a loser without being a hipster. Take the cast of Community: the only hipsters are Jeff and Britta, who are also the only "white people" (under 60) by the show's implicit definition. (In another sociological perceptual filter, Annie, who is Jewish, might be "white" and/or a hipster, but here she is "ethnic" and a preppie nerd.) They're two different, mutually hostile varieties of hipster, too: Jeff is a metrosexual hipster, a narcissistic womanizer; Britta's a hipster's hipster, a white liberal guilt-tripper who scorns Jeff`s metrosexuality as vulgarly retro. Although by the show's definition, which coincides with Lander's hipster definition of hipsters, non-"whites" can't be hipsters, they can be hipper than the hipsters (like Abed) or cooler than the hipsters (like Troy: you're automatically cooler than white people if you're black unless you're Christian, like Shirley, and the white people are implied agnostics or atheists - Community is easily the most overtly secular, or rather specifically anti-Christian, mainstream show I've ever seen, also reflecting trends within the young hipster demographic it seeks). Meanwhile, the show itself is a hipster comedy (due to its self-reflexive pop humour and mixture of liberal inclusiveness and cheeky post-p.c. "edge") about losers (adults and other failures attending community college). The undercurrent of class warfare was most apparent in the episode where Jeff and Britta (who, as white people, are the most sensitive about their social status, since after all they belong to the social group that's losing ground, as Lander records) get involved in a battle with some obnoxious high school kids who mock them for being unsuccessful adults. The hipster-loser viewer can't help but cheer when the show plays to her prejudices in the climactic food fight by providing legends that identify the moronic, infantile teens as future Ivy League graduates and Supreme Court justices.

Bored to Death is likewise a hipster comedy about losers, although the set of reference points is literary-hipster rather than pop-hipster (although the boundary is hazy, since the hardboiled detective character is pop-literary and comic books are both a pop and a print medium). Pre-recession, the loser isn't a failure so much as a fuck-up: there is no conceivable universe in which George Constanza, Bernard Black or Mark and Jez could get ahead. We identify with the loser's inability to navigate ordinary life but recognize that our own incapacities are comically exaggerated in these characters. In recessionary loser comedy, in contrast, the loser has failed not due to obvious, gross incapacities but because "failure" is normal (even if it hurts white people's egos) or the odds are so stacked against him or her. Both Community and Bored to Death are - in their different ways, at moments, in between the comic hijinks that are the main point - about learning how to negotiate failure, which is also re-understanding what success is. A borderline loser in the first season, by the start of the second season "Jonathan Ames" is a confirmed loser: his second novel has been rejected, he's teaching writing (the seal of death for most writers' careers unless they're already famous) at night school, and George can't help him out with assignments because of budget cuts to his magazine. By the anxious standards of the early 21st century, Jonathan is, as he worries out loud, "washed up at 30." Of course as George, in his role as sage, tells Jonathan, that's completely absurd. A thirty-year-old is a child (as the casting of baby-faced, adolescent-voiced Schwartzman emphasizes), and life still holds decades of experiences and surprises. And even if Jonathan is never a success as a writer or anything else, as George tells him in a later episode, how can he be a "failure" when he's a writer and a detective - two pleasurable occupations that make life more interesting?

The Writer and the Detective

Why, anyway, the hardboiled detective - whether you're Jonathan Ames or Roberto Bolano, who teasingly claimed in the last interview before his death that he would rather have been a homicide detective than a writer? If I recall correctly from my early teenage reading, Camus liked the hardboiled detective too, that lone, lonely figure who lived by his own code. In the secular, relativistic early 21st century, only the fantasy of being as cool, iconic and in control as the hardboiled detective can survive the scrutiny of the ironic postmodern/hipster eye (in which regard he is to us as the dandy was to Baudelaire). The fantasy of being a hardboiled detective is, after all, is, like the fantasy of being a writer (however dreary and demoralizing the reality may be), not only a leap of faith that life might, after all, be more interesting than it appears, but a fantasy of oneself being interesting. Like the Quixotism of Emma Bovary or, for that matter, of Quixote. Except that the Quixotism of "Jonathan Ames" is more gently entertained, at least in the show's first two seasons, as though what the late Western capitalist/recessionary/corporate world of the eternal bottom line could use is a little more whimsical fantasy, not less.