Louis CK, Moron

Behold generational talent and multi-hyphenate genius Louis CK on Theo Von’s podcast last month:

CK: There is a sign at one of the theaters I did this week. It says, "Hatred will not be allowed here. Our policy towards hatred is zero tolerance." But that's a weird—

Von: Right. "We hate hatred."

CK: Zero tolerance is something—that's hate. That's hate, isn't it?

Von: Yeah.

CK: Tolerance and hatred are opposites.

Von: Yeah.

CK: So hatred and zero tolerance are equal. They're the same. "No hatred of any kind," it said. I'm like, what about I hate my dad a little bit?

Ha, ha! Who ever would have thought of that? Let’s get this guy another Grammy!

No, but, hackery aside, CK’s conversation with Von was actually pretty interesting. He was ostensibly there to promote his new novel (ew), but he also spent a long portion of the episode waxing poetic about (what he sees as) his personal growth since being exposed as a sex predator eight years ago. Unless I’m mistaken, this is the first time he’s attempted to explain his behavior as the result of a sex addiction—one that he shares with Von, who encouraged him to go into a 12-step program for sex and love addicts:

CK: …You told me about this program. You told me about SLAA and about a 12 step approach to what I was suffering from.

Von: Yeah, I was so amazed that you didn't have some of the familiarity with it. I think

CK: I never heard of it, and I didn't think it was for me at all. You told me about it and I was like, "Yeah, yeah, that's not for me. 

Von: You've become such a role model to me through that program, man. You've become somebody that when you talk, I listen when you want to know how I feel. I know you mean it. Yeah, man. I mean, you've become just a real role model to me. You've become somebody that I aspire to be able to get through some of the problems that I have because I've seen you get through 'em, man.

He also reaffirmed, as he did seven years ago, though no one seems to care about this anymore, that everything his victims said was true:

Von: I think there was one time you said, because you've been through a lot of stuff in your career—you'd had—this is when things had gotten kind of crazy in your career with accusations and all types of stuff—and accurate accusations—

CK: Accurate accusations. [Laughter]

Von: But you said, "man, I feel so free." And there was something about that to me, I think about that once a week. I think about just the little pieces of ourselves that we try to manage and operate and we don't even know what they are and we don't even know why they're in pieces. It's like trying to put some glass together so you can get a clear reflection of yourself, and it's just like, fuck, how did this, I didn't even break this, and I'm just so tired of cutting my fucking fingers, trying to get a look at myself.

CK: Yeah, you're trying to piece together that broken mirror and cutting your fingers. That's beautiful. It is true. And when life fucks it up for you, when it gets torn up, it's a relief. That's why I felt free because I had tried to manage these problems I had inside of me for so many years, and I tried to feel like I was a normal person or that I was what I thought of as a good person, but I was doing shit in the background in my life that I was ashamed of. I was hurting other people and trying to tell myself I wasn't. And those things on the edge, using another person but you got their permission first—you're still using another person. You're not being with them, you're using them.

Note that he’s sticking by the story he used in his initial statement and comeback special: that he obtained consent to masturbate in front of some of the women he masturbated in front of. (Not all of them, however, and he never seems to mention the yet-unidentified woman he revealed in a 2015 apology to Rebecca Corry, confusing her with someone he shoved in a bathroom.) To my eye, this continued obfuscation of the nature of consent—those weren’t “edge” cases, they were straightforward abuses of power—raise questions about his sincerity in accounting for his actions. So does his strange insistence that he cannot apologize for what he did:

CK: …There's so many times where I just want to come out and tell people I'm fucking sorry. I'm really sorry. I hurt people. And I've felt like in the way that it was so hard to take all of that once, that much anger at once, it's like, I just don't have a "sorry" that covers it. And I don't have only one feeling. "Sorry" is not the only feeling I have. And so I don't want to say something—and I'm scared of the way that anything I say can be used by other people. There's all kind of fears that come up and I'm very raw in that space. But that's all because I'm making these choices to stay in this. And it's 'cause I love the work and I want to share it. So I guess I really wish there was, I could have a simple kind of watershed where I can say just "yes" to everything that happened, and I'm sorry, I really am. And I'm just trying to do better. And I don't think I can prove that to everybody, 'cause it's a private thing. It's a one-to-one man thing. It's not a famous guy act. But I got work that I want to share with people. I have work that I think is worthy. 

This is a guy who ironically titled his second comeback special Sorry, a word that never once appeared in his supposed official apology. Again, I just don’t buy it. If you can issue a fake apology, you can issue a real one; if you can consciously pivot to right-wing audiences, as CK did in the wake of his cancellation, you can pivot away from them; if you can associate with reactionary comedians who treated MeToo like a witch hunt, you can disassociate with them; perhaps you can even acknowledge that sexual assault is a huge ongoing problem, especially in your industry, where your former manager who covered up for your abuses remains a huge power player. 

But CK hasn’t done any of this. Instead he’s hung out with Dave Chappelle and Shane Gillis and Tim Dillon and all manner of right-wing comedians who believe he was unjustly tarred and feathered by the women he harassed. Tomorrow he’ll perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in a gig he just preemptively defended as a valuable cultural interchange. The man is and always has been a fraud. 

Theo Von, Moron

CK’s conversation with Von was also interesting for what Von revealed about himself. His own sex addiction, he said, is so bad that he functionally cannot be alone with women who treat him nicely, which may explain why he almost never has women on his podcast. The following comes during a discussion about porn:

Von: It's like, oh, that sedative. It was just a full body sedative. But yeah, I didn't have—it marred really my ability to make a lot of connections, because I'll even notice still in my life, and I still need to go through my steps again. I need to check in with my sponsor today, but if I'm face to face with a woman and they say something nice about me, I can't stay there for a second. I cannot—even a woman looking at me, I can't even, I just have to—

CK: What happens? What makes you run away from it?

Von: Inside of me it feels fucking—it almost feels like a dirty electricity comes inside of me or just shows up at the front of me… Having that need for attention from women, or watching pornography, or watching porno and stuff, it's taken a lot of things, moments in my life. One time I was on a vacation with my girlfriend. Instead of spending time—I was texting some other woman, or I was watching pornography, and it took us out of this great weekend where we're supposed to—and it's like, I can never get that right in a way.

CK: But it's understandable, because you had that feeling that if you're with somebody, you're too much for them. You're scared to be alone with her. You're scared, so you're finding a way to not be in the room.

Von: Yeah, and it's just that old pattern, though, that if I don't try and get it under control, if I don't try to do better—and I think even this year's been tough for me, it's just like, yeah, I just feel like work's gotten busy and it just makes me scared kind of a little bit. And then popularity makes you scared and that's kind of scary.

We’ll return momentarily to his comments about popularity being scary; first I need to share his fond recollection of the first time a Black man touched him:

Von: I remember the first time a Black man touched my hand one time and it was different.

CK: Sure. How old were you?

Von: I was probably 10 or something. Nine.

CK: Why did he touch your hand?

Von: Well, I went over to my buddy's house and they were swimming just in this little kind of round little, I dunno if it was a pool or just, it had tetanus in it or whatever it was. It was like something for animals. They had put water in it. So we're just playing in there and swimming in there, whatever. And this guy, this Black man had come and he was kind of tickling us and stuff sometimes. I think he was being okay. I don't know if he was. But anyway, I don't know. But then he lifted me up out of the thing too, and I just remember also he touched my hand and I just was like, oh, that's interesting. This was kind of interesting. Dude, I remember I walked into a Black doctor, this is in Nashville. This is two years ago. I'd never walked into a room in my life with a Black doctor. And I was like, whoa. And I wasn't like—

CK: It's new. It's something's new.

Von: Yeah. And I was like, you guys, everybody looked at the same books or charts. I just didn't know. It's almost like when you're at Foot Locker and there's a white woman working in there. You know what I'm saying?

CK: And you're like, this is interesting.

Von: Yeah, I support, I'm here for it.

What is there to say but: ?????????

MAGA Comedian Speaks Out After Bombing Netflix Special

“We might shoot again at some point,” Theo Von said of the botched stand-up taping.

The Daily BeastEboni Boykin-Patterson

Okay, now let’s skip forward a few weeks. If you’ve been online at all lately, you may have caught wind of the hubbub over Von’s Netflix special taping in New York last week. He bombed so badly that neo-Nazi Milo Yiannopoulos, who was in the audience, said it seemed like he was under the influence. In a solo episode of his podcast this week, he attributed the fiasco to a combination of factors: one, he’d been weaning himself off his antidepressants (I’m not a doctor, but don’t do this), and two, he was paranoid in the wake of both the Charlie Kirk assassination and a DHS video featuring him: 

Von: We were taping it last week and about a month before I started, I quit taking some antidepressants. I was taking, I just kind of self weaned myself off. And the reason why was because I wanted, during the comedy show, I wanted to have a little bit more emotion during it. I wanted to have this, I just wanted to have some more feelings…  I was doing fine with that. We're headed into the comedy show, and then the Charlie Kirk thing happened. The Charlie Kirk murder happened, which is really crazy. It was just a crazy thing. I've talked about it before. I'm not going to talk about it anymore right now. 

But a few days after that, or maybe a week after that, the Department of Homeland Security put a video up online talking about—they started making trap beat edits and banger edits to evicting people from the country or eliminating illegals, maybe some criminals, some people just undocumented, just across the spectrum. So they put a video of mine that I'd made for somebody in a parking lot, probably maybe a year and a half ago, just jokingly… The video was, a girl that walked up to me in a parking lot and she had said, "Hey, my friend just got deported. What do you have to say?" Or, "Do you have a message?" I can't remember what it was. And I was just like, "bye." And I didn't know if it was real or not, I had no idea. I was just joking around. A stranger came up to me in a parking lot, I think it was after a show, and there were some people gathered around and we were just kind of BSing and taking pictures and just kind of associating. 

So anyway, long story short, that happens. So this video goes mega viral, 25 million, 30 million views. It's everywhere. And the front of that Homeland Security video, it's on the White House thing, it's on everything. It's everywhere. And the first 10 seconds of it are me, right? I don't have anything to do with this shit. Nobody asked me about it. 

He goes on to explain that after DHS posted the video—in which he says, “Heard you got deported, dude, bye!”—he received hateful messages taking issue with his attitudes toward immigration, which he insists are more nuanced than the video suggests; when he asked the feds to take it down, they did. The incident freaked him out so much that he was concerned for his safety, tweeting that he was afraid someone might attack him “because they think I’m some final boss of deportatins or somethin.” (He showed no such concern for the targets of his many racist and anti-immigrant jokes; alas, speech only inspires violence in one direction.) Fortunately one of his friends in the Trump administration was looking out for him: 

Von: I woke up the next morning to a text from a high government official saying, ‘Hey, if you need some extra security in your neighborhood, or some extra police cars on patrol, let me know.’ And I'm like, what are you talking about? Extra security? I don't have any, I don't even know the code of my Ring camera. I don't even know how to log in. So it's like, you're just gonna put police cars in my neighborhood? What are my neighbors going to think? Now they're fearful. It just like, I don't know, man. That really kind shook me. It really shook me. 

But you keep marching on. And you start getting security. But now you have security, right? And the thing is you just don't know. You just don't know. Right? There was a moment on the—it was White House. Because the White House also put this out. Thank you, White House. And look, I'm all for tighter boards. I'm all for accurate knowing who's on—I'm all for knowing who is in a country. I'm all for knowing what's in the cupboard of a society. I think you should know every item on the log. I think it should be known, right? I do. Now, how do you get there? That's the bigger question.

So, yada yada, Von basically went into the taping afraid that he was going to get murdered like Charlie Kirk:

Von: So now I have this thing with security, but then you get a security person, and now if you're walking on a security guy, then that's kind of uncomfortable. Because now, it kind of makes you spooked. You're like, what's going on? So there's just like all of that's happening. And then we get to just the job, which is performing, speaking in front of strangers. You had just seen this thing with Charlie Kirk, right? We all watch somebody get lit up. We all watch somebody get murdered casually on our phones. And I don't mean to say it like that, but that's how it all, it came across to us. There's no warning on a lot of video, you see? And so just a lot of, I think unnecessary pressure, a lot of stress going on that—some of it I was aware of, and some of it you just don't know. You're aware of it, I think because I think sometimes you don't know what stress you're holding.

Look, clearly Von is dealing with some mental health struggles. Elsewhere in this episode he describes a doctor’s appointment two days after the Kirk shooting where a nurse came up to him and said, “I brought you something,” which freaked him out so much he complained to the doctor and later teared up telling his mother about it. (Presumably he thought the nurse was a fan invading his privacy, but he doesn’t offer any details.) While I have sympathy for these issues, I also think they’re symptomatic of a self-delusion that has pervaded comedy for years now, with people like Von maintaining a sort of blissful ignorance about the fact that they live in the same world as everyone else. He may not like being associated with the Trump regime’s anti-immigration crackdown, but the fact is he himself associated with it when he helped get Trump elected. You can see roughly the same thing in, say, Tim Dillon and Dave Smith’s discomfort with ICE raids, or Dillon and Jim Jefferies losing their spots on the Riyadh Comedy Festival immediately after bragging about their willingness to whitewash Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses. They got what they wanted; now they're finding out exactly what that means.

As it becomes clearer who these guys have aligned with, I suspect they'll have a tougher and tougher time reckoning with that alignment. Some, I’m sure, will find a way to swallow the contradictions. Others, like Von, may find that they're not cut out to be footsoldiers for fascism. 

Nimesh Patel, Moron

I want to share one more thing with you, which is the screenshot of an email Nimesh Patel included in a now-deleted TikTok post defending himself against accusations that he only dropped out out of the Riyadh Comedy Festival after the story went mainstream. In the email, he tells his representative that he wants out of the festival because he feels it’s immoral, and also, it's not enough money:

I simply cannot get over this. You’re not supposed to admit that!