Louis Ck Ridiculous Review Netflix

Louis CK: Ridiculous review – the troubled comedian returns … with a whimper

The fallen star, who was accused of sexual misconduct in 2017, is back in a Netflix special which has its moments but not enough of them

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Louis CK is back, again. It’s been nearly a decade since the comedian, actor and writer-director admitted his guilt in a series of sexual misconduct allegations, resulting in a number of organizations severing ties and sending him into relative exile – for a few months, anyway. Since then, he’s toured extensively (often to a crowd reception implying he was the one wronged) and self-released four comedy specials, among other endeavors, so it’s not as if the existence of a new one is especially surprising. But it is notable that Ridiculous is backed by Netflix – a full-circle moment for a comic whose last pre-scandal hour titled 2017 was a Netflix release as well.

It’s less a triumphant return than a gradual slinking back, an unspoken assumption that no one really cares that much about his behavior; no particular defense or apology, just a shruggy emoticon. When describing a tour of his elderly father’s prospective nursing home in the special, CK says: “The theme of the tour is: ‘This Is What This Is’,” implying a sense of grim acceptance. It feels a bit like that’s the theme of the Ridiculous tour, too – whether we want it to be or not.

There are other moments in the special that place CK’s supposedly self-deprecating presentation against his less abstract failings with a noisier clang of contrast. A genuinely funny observation like “I can’t be held responsible for what I dream. I’m not a good guy in my dreams,” doesn’t hit as squarely as it should because we’ve already heard extensively about him doing bad-guy stuff in real life. It’s also hard to avoid reading some moments intended as self-deprecating or honest, as when he talks about not having sex much recently and primarily dating women his own age, as a kind of tacit burnishing of his regular-schlub cred, positioning himself as essentially harmless. Maybe this isn’t fair; there are plenty of comedians where we haven’t been given the opportunity to assess whether their dark side is being downplayed or set to the side for the sake of a funny bit. But it’s the reality CK lives in, albeit one firmly denied by plenty of his acolytes.

That disconnect, the lack of shared reality, accounts for some but not all of the special’s halting, uneven quality. It has brilliant stretches, to be sure. CK remains, unavoidably, a keen comic mind, both structurally and instinctively. When he begins a bit about how much he hates waking up on an airplane, he backtracks to clarify that waking up in general is terrible, and his nonverbal acting out of its routine horrors is laugh-out-loud funny. A little sidebar about his love for the damp pad universally present in a package of chicken breast is like a classic Seinfeld observational moment, only pushed further by a visceral weirdness that the buttoned-up veteran Seinfeld would probably avoid.

Elsewhere, though, he relies on dopey shock laughs. In past specials, at least some of those shocks would often stem more carefully from a logical progression, almost trapping the audience into laughing at something taboo. Here, jokes about cremating his mother or a callback to a child-abuse joke from earlier in the set just feel like blunt-force mischief – almost obligatory in their pushing of some imagined envelope. Some jokes don’t even involve the effort of pushing; they’re more CK trudging through the sourness of saying his 42-year-old friend had trouble getting pregnant because her eggs were “scrambled” (yuk, yuk) or “rotten” (yuk, yuk, yuk!). The joke is: he’s being a dick?

CK is clearly capable of more than this, and Ridiculous has flashes of his writer’s flair for crystallizing what could be standard comedians’ laments into something more vividly relatable. “Every part of my body hates the part next to it,” he says at one point, a reminder of how gifted he is at describing the physical indignities of ageing, or just plain being alive. Maybe it’s telling that this far off from his creative peak, it’s this material that remains punchy as the supposed trenchant-philosopher side of his persona (like his famous “everything is amazing and nobody is happy” routine from years ago) trails off. In a way, the pedestrian nature of some of this Netflix-released special is what makes it valuable. It’s a reminder that CK’s weaknesses, on and off the stage, are ultimately his own doing.