How Louis CK dimin­ish­es the pow­er shame holds over me

What makes you feel ashamed? What are the thoughts har­bour­ing in your sub­con­scious, whose pres­ence hard­ly reg­is­ter on an aver­age day but can instant­ly sur­face when it’s trig­gered? Some­times these are twist­ed reflex­es you don’t even believe in when giv­en the chance to think ratio­nal­ly. Oth­er times it’s some­thing linked to the past that you’ve tried and tried to sup­press. Or it could be less severe, a fan­ta­sy you indulge in but could nev­er voice out loud.

Around oth­er peo­ple, we suf­fo­cate these bub­bling, mean­der­ing thoughts with affir­ma­tions of how nor­mal we actu­al­ly are. But we secret­ly know that they are a part of us even if we try to scrub clean the immoral, irre­spon­si­ble, some­times socio­path­ic, or explic­it­ly worse, acci­den­tal­ly sex­ist or racist glitches.

Louis CK is here to drag out every last dreg of your shame, embar­rass­ment, and guilt. His new stand-up spe­cial, ​‘2017’, makes you face the nar­cis­sism of re-read­ing your own sent emails, the aggres­sion of want­i­ng to tell a harm­less kid to shut up, the depres­sion that comes with actu­al­ly con­sid­er­ing sui­cide, and the lack of guilt when giv­en the option to feed a dam­aged res­cue dog prozac.

But mirac­u­lous­ly, you don’t feel shame­ful that he’s ver­bal­is­ing your secrets, act­ing out with poignant accu­ra­cy the expres­sions of shock and dis­gust, because by ridi­cul­ing these demons, he seems to reduce the pow­er they have over you. Unlike a lot of com­e­dy, which makes you feel a lit­tle cheap, like you exploit­ed oth­ers for a laugh, Louis CK makes you crack up at the expense of yourself.

His com­e­dy address­es the most uncom­fort­able social nuances, and ​‘2017’ opens with: ​“I think women should be allowed to kill babies.” Pro-choice cheers come up from the audi­ence, walk­ing into a trap as he explains, ​“Because I don’t think life is that impor­tant, peo­ple get too excit­ed about life. Make a list of every shit­ty thing ever, that’s in life.” This should sound mor­bid, but his self-dis­parag­ing chuck­le and ​‘we’re all in this togeth­er’ men­tal­i­ty ral­lies every­one along.

The guilt attached to abor­tions is tremen­dous, and it’s often wors­ened by peo­ple telling women how bad it is every step of the way. But here, this feel­ing of cul­pa­bil­i­ty is trumped by the effort of stay­ing alive, which, CK assures us, is some­thing to con­grat­u­late our­selves about. ​“You’re not sup­posed to talk about sui­cide, but you should be able to talk about it! The whole world is just made up of peo­ple who didn’t kill them­selves today.” Don’t we deserve a break?

His com­pas­sion­ate approach to self-reflec­tion cul­mi­nates in the admis­sion that, even in mid­dle age, he still feels con­fused about his own iden­ti­ty. Every time Mag­ic Mike, the Chan­ning Tatum dra­ma about male strip­pers, comes on TV, CK says, he plays ​“A lit­tle game of chick­en.” He grins, ​“They all start strip­ping, and I start hav­ing all these feel­ings. It’s not a bon­er,” he makes it clear, ​“But I can feel my dick start to turn over a lit­tle bit.”

But he wants to stay the way he is – unlike the open­ness with which he would treat oth­ers of any sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, he says, with a mid-sen­tence chuck­le, it’s his every right to oppress his own poten­tial­ly bud­ding homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. ​“I’m 49 years old! I don’t wan­na enter the gay com­mu­ni­ty now as the ​‘new gay guy’. That’s mine to just vio­lent­ly push down.” Like what a gen­tle anti-ther­a­pist might say, isn’t it our choice whether we keep our inner con­tra­dic­tions bot­tled up or not?

The spe­cial is vul­gar and star­tling through­out – CK has said in the past that he enjoys mak­ing his audi­ence uncom­fort­able. But I felt tru­ly ner­vous for him when, halfway through a joke about a group of ​‘911 deniers’, who, unlike the con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists, are nine peo­ple that just don’t buy into the con­cept of ​‘eleven’ (“It should be one-teen”), it becomes clear that he’s putting on an African-Amer­i­can accent. Maybe it’s because the accent is poor­ly done, but when he throws a curve­ball and apol­o­gis­es to any Chi­nese per­son that he would have offend­ed, the offen­sive­ness is slight­ly mitigated.

“Here’s the thing,” he says after apol­o­gis­ing again for doing the accent, ​“Stereo­types are harm­ful. But the voic­es are fun­ny. I don’t know how to rec­on­cile those two facts.” I think back at times I’ve acci­den­tal­ly slipped into sil­ly voic­es and felt humil­i­at­ed at my own igno­rance after­wards. But instead of jump­ing straight to self-hatred, being hon­est is a start to a con­ver­sa­tion around this slip-up, when we have no oth­er inten­tion than to make each oth­er laugh. Like a mid­dle-shelf deodor­ant, CK neu­tralis­es the bead­ing odour from your under­arms – you still sweat a lit­tle, but at least you’re not so self-con­scious of giv­ing off a stink.

Our minds are weak, try as we might to con­di­tion and train it to be the most per­fect moral com­pass. The deep­est shames that make us who we are will be with us for­ev­er, and there are some that no com­e­dy can ever reduce. But I think we deserve a break from them every now and then.