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Louie: Season One Blu-Ray/DVD Review

Should it last beyond a second season, Louie will make my list of all-time favorite comedies. I’d call it after these initial 13 episodes, but that’s preferential treatment. Louis C.K. has made me laugh embarrassingly hard since I first saw him on late-night shows in the mid '90s, not realizing he also wrote for some of them. His stand-up performances are perfect executions of unapologetic discomfort involving the human body, religion, race, and food. Loads funnier than his previous show (HBO’s chuckle-inducing Lucky Louie ), FX’s Louie is must-watch TV for anyone unafraid of a few fucking four-letter words.

Louis C.K. is as unabashed as they come, even calling an HBO special Shameless . That doesn’t mean he performs asinine stunts in public. The man understands that in a world that houses billions of people, the problems he faces are not exclusively his own. Like a child with anger issues, he earnestly holds many of life’s quirks beneath a filthy microscope, questioning everything and enjoying little. Regardless of how “real” any of it is, his off-kilter point of view is always convincing.

Written, directed, edited, produced, and performed by the man himself, Louie shares very few similarities with other TV comedies. Most episodes are split into two stories, interspersed with stand-up footage shot inside of small comedy clubs. Stand-up footage, really? Yes, and worry not. The ghost of Seinfeld is entirely absent; Louis C.K.’s brusque approach is on the opposite pole of observational humor. He’s more interested in whether the word “faggot” is as offensive to gay people as it is to non-gay people.

Partly inspired by reality, Louie indeed has its main character as a divorced comedian with two daughters. Unlike reality, Louie has a brother, Robbie (Robert Kelly), who pops by to bring Louie down about his divorce and to badger their newly-lesbianized mother (Mary Louise Wilson) as to why she never told him “I love you.” Out of context, that may sound weak, but Kelly and Wilson excel in making this the funniest, most cringe-worthy minutes of the season. Louie dates, or attempts to date, a handful of women, usually ending in disaster (one manages to escape his non-amorous advances by helicopter), though he manages to hit it off with an incredibly rude heckler. These are just the normal storylines.

Men Funnier Than Women | The Mary Sue

A group of researchers from the University of New Mexico conducted an Official Scientific Study and determined that “humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males.” In fact, that was the title of the study . So, to sum this up: a bunch of scientists got together for a beer one day and said, “Comedians get all the girls! Stupid comedians!” And then they cried into the aforementioned beer and got funding for a scientific study based on something that is entirely subjective and involved non-comedians writing comedy. They hijacked comedy and tried doing science to it.

Before we get all angry over this, let’s get something straight from the start: This is balderdash. Poppycock. Fuzzy math. All of it. No one can define what is funny or who is the funniest — especially quantitatively — because what’s funny to one only has a partial chance of being funny to someone else. Look at Tim & Eric . There can actually be funny college students among these 400, but maybe 10 of them have successfully written a monologue or a sketch. The rest are happy to be consumers of comedy. So, scientists are asking people who have no desire to write comedy to write comedy, and then judge their ability to be funny after they complete this assignment. No bothering with using actual cartoonists, writers, artists, nothing like that. Just 400 random college students. Being judged by scientists, more non-comedians.

Here’s the thing: this study is stupid. In every way. Yes, many of us are sexually attracted to funny people. And people from both genders are funny. We didn’t need a scientific study to determine that. Many of us are conducting our own personal experiments on that very subject without even having to ask for money.

But why do this experiment at all? The objective of this study doesn’t seem to be the gender-related result; it was to connect intelligence and humor (yes, one needs the former in order to be successful at the latter — duh) and then connect that to sexual attractiveness. It was not intended to test relative “funnyness” of genders, and so really shouldn’t be used as proof of that. Maybe as a good start to go back with a differently structured study… but that’s still leaving aside the issue of quantitatively trait.

I should add that I do happen to know one scientist who is, in fact, a real comedian. He is very funny and happily married (to a professionally funny woman). So this is clearly not the case for all scientists. Just the lame ones. And if 100% of all these scientists were also professional comedians, then we will revisit this in the future.