If you can’t laugh at life, what the fuck’s the point?
At the heart of Louie – and much of Louis C.K.’s stand-up – is this question, this challenge to find laughter in the life’s banalities and disappointments. It’s a viewpoint I’ve very much missed having on air the last 20 months, and is the focal point of both “Back” and “Model”, a season premiere that dips even farther into absurdity, yet still maintains the same sharp edge of societal observation and personal revelation – in other words, Louie is back and better than ever.
Of the two, “Model” is certainly the much subtler episode – admittedly a simple accomplishment, given that “Back” features the return of Louie’s poker games, home of the show’s most vulgar material. But both are essentially about the same thing: humans are weird creatures who force themselves to define everything around them (including themselves) in very safe, sterile terms. Louie’s no victim of it himself, observing youngsters as zombies absorbed by their smartphone screens, and assuming he has nothing to offer a beautiful model-slash-daughter of an astronaut: society allows us to build these safety nets where we don’t talk about “vagina dirt” at ritzy benefits, ignoring the existential desperation we all feel underneath it (while bombing during his set at Seinfeld’s benefit, he jokingly asks if the charity event is “soul laundering” for the billionaires and trillionaires of the Hamptons).
There’s certainly safety to be found in that, of course: it’s when Louie ventures out of those pre-conceptions that he is able to reach a larger truth or find a moment of peace. These episodes are the spiritual successor to “Something Is Wrong”, the season three premiere: in that, Louie was attempting to reconcile his lost youth by adopting a stereotypical middle-age persona: the biker. What happens? He crashes and ends up in the hospital, scolded by his wife for his immaturity. In “Back”, he hurts himself trying to point out the vibrator he wants to buy for himself – which leads him to the ominous Dr. Bigelow, a man who is enjoying the shit out of his moist sandwich.
While in the office, Dr. Bigelow talks to him about the reconstitution of the human spine: he compares the biological design to a clothesline (horizontal and taught, but flexible) and our current use of it to a flagpole (rigid and vertical). When Louie asks if there’s a way to fix it, the good doctor informs that yes, in about 20,000 years biology will have corrected itself – and in the mean time, all we can do is enjoy the seconds and minutes in between when we’re horizontal.
“Model” follows as an example of this: when Louie shows up unprepared and bombs at the benefit, he ends up meeting the daughter of an astronaut, who takes him for a cruise in her Maserati and has sex with him in her enormous mansion. After, she talks to him about the sheer power of his laughter, a testament to the role of humor, in a world full of so much animosity and cruelty – had he not been able to make her laugh, would she even notice the overweight bald guy wearing dorky jeans at a black-tie affair?
Of course, these moments are fleeting in life: it’s not long before Louie’s arrested for punching her in the face and causing permanent damage to her eye (he accidentally elbows her while she was tickling him). Life takes equally awesome and shitty turns on a regular basis, and often we don’t realize how valuable something was until it’s long gone (at one point, the astronaut’s daughter suggests to him he’s dreaming; I’d say getting punched in the face and sued is a pretty solid wake-up call) – and if we can’t laugh at it when it does, we might miss the next connection right in front of us (Louie’s story makes the previously-hostile waitress at the local bar laugh hysterically, and the episode ends with her getting “us” a drink).
As always, Louie is a contemplation on life, a wonderfully vulgar exploration of existentialism, told through surrealist portraits of every day stories, and accentuated by its wonderfully composed jazz soundtrack (itself a master work in sound design, able to convey both action and emotion with melody and/or tambor). Simply put, “Back” and “Model” are a triumphant return for television’s best comedy, a show that hasn’t lost a single step, even after nearly two years off the air.
“Back” – A
“Model” – A