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Saturday, November 11, 2017

Louis C.K.'s earlier non-denial denial

Comedian Louis C.K. has come clean and admitted to having masturbated in front of numerous women, something he had been rumored to have done for years. He didn't even attempt to deny it, or throw any accusations back at his accusers, or lawyer up, or hire Black Cube.

He just said, yep, it's true. His straightforwardness was almost admirable. 

But it was a far cry from the way he had previously deflected the accusations when asked about them: 

”Well, you can’t touch stuff like that,” he told New York last year. “There’s one more thing I want to say about this, and it’s important: If you need your public profile to be all positive, you’re sick in the head. I do the work I do, and what happens next I can’t look after. So my thing is that I try to speak to the work whenever I can. Just to the work and not to my life.”

That's actually a masterpiece of obfuscatory language. If you were to hear it in person, it would be difficult to know how to respond, since the "answer" he's already given is so hard to digest. That blizzard of words was designed to leave you so confused that you would be unsure how to keep pressing him for an answer. 

But let's parse that statement, sentence by sentence.

"Well, you can't touch stuff like that."

Was Louis saying that the interviewer was venturing into forbidden territory by having the temerity to ask such a question? Or was he saying that it would be verboten for him to discuss it? And whom, exactly, did he mean by "you?" Himself?

Louis certainly had no qualms about touching his own stuff in the presence of all those female comedians.

"There's one more thing I want to say about this, and it's important: If you need your public profile to be all positive, then you're sick in the head."

You have to admire the way he emphasized his own statement's importance, as if it was an urgent moral message which everybody should pay attention to. But doesn't practically everyone in Hollywood need their public profile to be "all positive?" Isn't that what all those agents and PR people are for? And isn't that what all that virtue signaling is for? So is Louis C.K. saying that all of Hollywood is sick in the head?

Well, at least he was being honest on that score.

But when you claim that others are sick in the head, you're at least implying that you yourself are healthy in the head. Does a guy who forces women to watch him wank it really fit that description?

"I do the work I do, and what happens next I can’t look after." 

Imagine a foreman at the GM plant in Lansing saying, "I do my job responsibly every day, but after my shift is over, and I have a few brewskis, well, I can't be responsible for what happens next."

But isn't an adult supposed to be responsible all the time? And if you can't look after your own behavior, who will?

"So my thing is that I try to speak to the work whenever I can. Just to the work and not to my life."

See? He's just doing his thing. Which is to "speak to the work" whenever he can. (Is that phrase vague and meaningless enough for you? No one actually chats with their own work, so you have to think about exactly what he means.)

"Just to the work and not to my life."

His meaning might have been clearer if he'd just said, "I try to speak about my work whenever I can. Just about the work and not about my life."

Then again, Louis obviously didn't want to be clear. He wanted the interviewer to back off, confused.

It's a little ironic for Louis to be making that distinction between his work and his life, given that his life is his comedic material.

And, at the end of all that, he still hadn't answered the question.

Why couldn't he have just replied, "I'm not going to tell you."

Or, "I'll take the Fifth."

Or, "That's none of your business."

Well, because those responses would have been admissions of guilt. The response he gave was designed to make people think, "What? Wait a sec.....what am I missing here?"

The only reason anyone ever obfuscates like that is because they have something to hide.

Louis used his words the same way a squid uses a blast of ink: to cloud your vision while he makes his escape.

That skillful use of words is probably what made Louis C.K. such a great comedian.

Even if he was sort of a jerkoff.

24 comments:

Anonymous said...

The guy is repulsive. Like a lot of people in the public eye (e.g., HRC), he talks in circles. You have a hard time understanding just what the person said.

- Susan

John Craig said...

Susan --
Good point, that non-denial denial was worthy of Hillary. She seemed to specialize in such an obtuse way of talking as well.

Anonymous said...

Another person who is hard to understand is Charlie Sheen. I also think that he's disordered, so it possibly ties into his mental state. I've read some of his interviews and I'm like, what exactly is he saying. It's confusing, nonsensical.

- Susan

Steven said...

Sir Humphrey is the king of obfuscation. I enjoy trying to follow him:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8keZbZL2ero


John Craig said...

Susan --
Ol' Charlie has a lot going on. He's a narcissistic personality to start with, on top of that he's been on steroids (which seem to feed the ego as much as the muscles), and he's taken a whole lot of recreational drugs too. Plus he's HIV-positive to boot. And he's also spent his career in Hollywood. It doesn't exactly all add up to a recipe for stability.

John Craig said...

Steven --
Just watched it, very good. I noticed that one of the commenters o that Youtube video also brought up Hillary Clinton, as did Susan in the first comment above. I guess HRC is regarded as the ultimate evasive non-answerer by many.

Anonymous said...

Isn't this sort of a political skill? Not an admirable one, but often employed. Many, many years ago I watched Ted Koppel interview Ted Kennedy. In a rare instance of Leftist media grilling one of their own - Koppel asked Kennedy a tough a question (can't remember what it was). Kennedy replied with a bunch of BS and didn't answer the question. Koppel kept at him, and this cycled through ~3 times. Koppel got sterner and tougher in his admonitions, pointing out that Kennedy had not answered the question. When the interview ended, Kennedy still hadn't answered the question.

- Ed

John Craig said...

Ed --
You're right, it IS a political skill. But people know when they're being BS-ed, and that has something to do with why Hillary couldn't get elected. She would never answer a question straightforwardly. I had forgotten about Teddy Kennedy, but yes, he was the same way.

Not Dave said...

So does Loretta Lynch.

John Craig said...

Not Dave --
I can't recall hearing her interviewed, but that makes sense; she was basically Eric Holder Jr. with her politicization of the DOJ.

europeasant said...

I know of Louis C K and even watched his comedy specials on NETFLIX once or twice for a few minuets. I never was able to make a connection to his brand of comedy.I like the old time comedy people a whole lot better, like Jackie Mason, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin Richard Pryor etc..
I read his WIKI site. He had some impressive parents (Harvard and the like) and he was even married until 2008. See, this is what I don't understand about him. He could have stayed married or brought along some girlfriend who could have serviced him and he would not be in the trouble he is in today.
I mean, isn't that what a woman is for, making sure that a man's needs are taken care of? I am not saying that's all that a woman is for because we need women for our survival, companionship and the like.
To me he seems like a politically correct POS plus here is what is claimed by WIKI
"He sent an e-mail to those subscribed to his mailing list in March 2016, criticizing Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump, likening him to Adolf Hitler and calling him an "insane bigot", but added, "He's not a monster. He's a sad man."

John Craig said...

Europeasant --
I liked the one or two Louis C.K. specials tat I saw, though for some reason I was never tempted to watch his regular FX show. I think Lenny Bruce was overrated, from the little I've seen of him; being censored was the best thing that ever happened to him, it made him "notorious," and a sort of martyr, which will help anyone's career. I liked Pryor too, less so Carlin.

Sure, Louis could have stayed married, but if you're a big star, you often get the opportunity to have sex with lots of different women, and that's a lot more exciting for most guys than having sex with the same woman over and over again.

I read about that email too, but he later repudiated/apologized for it, and said it was crazy for him to write, and said he would never be as directly political again. So he wasn't quite the pc hypocritical POS that, say, Harvey Weinstein was.

Anonymous said...

I thought Louis CK's apology was weird. In it he kept mentioning his dick. It's was like... he couldn't give it up.

OT, have you heard about the kid in day care who died because he had a severe dairy allergy & was given a grilled cheese sandwich? I smell a Papini, or as you would put it, a panini.

I can see the kid puking, or getting a severe gastro reaction, but dying? I dunno.

I'm suspicious of a lot of food allergy stories anyway.

Lolly

John Craig said...

Lolly --
He did sound pretty graphic, as if he was trying to get one last thrill from it.

No, haven't heard of that kid......ah, so you're the one who made that joke about my typo? (That comment wasn't signed.) I'm not even sure that was a typo (Freudian slip type) or an Autocorrect occasioned by my not having capitalized the first letter of her last name when I wrote that. Either way.....you've got me dead to rights, I do think she's attractive.

I'm less suspicious of food allergy stories than I am of SIDS, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which got a lot of play a few years back. Food allergies are harder to fake. (And wouldn't autopsies look for poison?)

Anonymous said...

So he likes to masturbate in front of women. So what? That’s his personal preference.

In every single instance of alleged misconduct, he told the woman beforehand what was about to happen and each woman had the opportunity to leave if they didn’t like what has happening. He didn’t use force, he didn’t intimidate them, he didn’t make sex a prequisite for obtaining a job, he didn’t use drugs to impair their judgment.

It’s a disgrace that Louis CK’s behavior is being misrepresented as predation or misconduct, and conflated with the coercive behavior of people like Weinstein or Cosby.

Here’s some weird stuff women I’ve observed from personal experiences with women:

- A girl once begged me to simulate rape. She got upset with me when the performance wasn’t authentic enough.

- Met a married woman who wanted to set up regular throat-fucking meetings because she really enjoyed the feeling of gagging.

- Woman asked me for a threesome with a prostitute.

- Woman asked me to fuck her in her office.
Multiple women have asked me to slap them across their face during sex.

- Multiple girlfriends were really into trannies for some reason - one really liked tranny porn, another would visit tranny whorehouses.

All these women are normal, well-adjusted, moral people who now have master’s degrees and six-figure jobs. Point is peoples’ sex lives tend to be peppered with non-normative elements. The attempt to characterize Louis C.K. as a misfit or criminal is a very dangerous path.

John Craig said...

Anon --
There's no question, there's a huge difference between what Louis C.K. did and what Weinstein and Cosby did. But I got the impression from reading a few articles that the women he asked didn't always say yes, and a number of them thought he was joking when he asked. That's a whole different thing than a knowing yes.

I'm all for consensual perversion. But this seems to have fallen short of consensual. The experiences you cite were all had within the context of what was already a sexual relationship. Louis C.K. was doing it with women he barely knew.

Plus, even if a job wasn't directly dependent on watching Louis C.K. jerk off, he was a powerful guy in the industry, and a lot of these women undoubtedly figured they had to stay on his good side to further their careers. All of the women he did it with were aspiring comediennes.

Anonymous said...

It’s my opinion that we live in culture where person A sexually escalates and person B decides whether or not to accept or reject the advance.

From my perspective, if the advance is accepted, the relations become consensual. If the advance is rejected, but the escalator persists, then the relations are non-consensual.

Louis CK advanced, but wasn’t rejected. It’s hard to view his behavior as non-consensual.

My interpretation is that he is being shamed for escalating, perhaps without much success.

John Craig said...

Anon --
I agree with your first two paragraphs, in fact am writing a post touching on that right now.

Disagree with your analysis of the Louis C.K. situation though. I don't think any of the women were enthusiastic participants in that situation, otherwise they would have been tempted to "join in" in some capacity or other, and I don't think any of them did. Most were reportedly just in varying degrees of disbelief while he jerked of fin front of them.

Anonymous said...

And learning about how our former President, Bush Sr., has been groping females for ages is quite eye opening. Not that I want to know this detail about him. He's been a flirt his entire life, so this might be part of his flirting with the ladies. Too bad none of the females didn't react in a way that let this globalist know just how put off they were by his crude behavior.

- Susan

John Craig said...

Susan --
I was willing to chalk up Bush Sr.'s recent behavior to senility. When you see pictures of him in his wheelchair he looks pretty gaga, and I think that after a certain age, they essentially become babies again, so I don't hold it against him.

Anonymous said...

There's a new report by a woman who stated that at age 16, she and her mother were having a photo with our former President. This was taken at some CIA event. Our former President was standing between the girl and her mother (and he seemed rational). Just as the camera goes off, Bush Sr. grabs the girl's bottom. Surprise, surprise. Maybe, he thought he was being cheeky, playful. It's a turn-off having a man do this.

- Susan

John Craig said...

Susan --
Yes, there are evidently several reports of this. As I said, senility. There are no reports of him doing this before he reached his 90's that I know of.

Anonymous said...

Another report is in of Bush Sr. squeezing a Michigan woman's bottom while a photo was being taken. This woman is now 55. The incident occurred in 1992. She claims Bush Sr. knew what he was doing. I read the story via the msn website. The man is being cheeky in my opinion,totally clueless about how inappropriate his behavior is/was.

- Susan

John Craig said...

Susan --
Cheeky, I guess, that's the word. You're right, in 1992 he was still President, can't write that one off to senility.