Beloved Tasmanian Hannah Gadsby has taken aim squarely at disgraced malcontent Louis CK in a searing new interview, labelling the man whose once-soaring career went down in a screaming heap amid multiple allegations of sexual misconduct both “angry and bitter” and “a joke.”
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Gadsby is in the middle of touring and promoting Douglas, the acclaimed follow-up show to her globally adored Nanette, part of which (mild spoiler alert here) includes a quip early in the show regarding her much-vaunted and now-abandoned plan to quit comedy.
Famously, Gadsby designed Nanette as a swansong to live performing, intending to perform the show in Australia and bow out of the comedy scene all together.
In Douglas, Gadsby references that by cracking wise that she “quit comedy the same way Louis CK said he was sorry.”
In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Gadsby elaborated on that line by making her thoughts on CK abundantly clear.
Gadsby pulled no punches in describing the inglorious fall of CK’s career, mulling over just how someone in that position manages to fuck it all up quite as badly as CK did.
He is a joke now. And I think it’s important to keep making that joke. This is dangerous to talk about, but I’ll give it a go. What the issue is, for a long time Louis C.K.’s comedy platform was that he was this hopeless guy bumbling through the world. And at some stage, he was no longer that, but that was still his voice. And I think he still believes that. He has not reassessed his position of power, and that is why he was able to abuse it. It’s difficult to see a shift in your own power and privilege. It’s not something we’re trained to do. He still honestly thinks he’s the victim in all of this.
She also took time to point out why exactly CK’s recent attempts at resurrecting his comedy career have come off as crass, tone-deaf, and thunderously unwarranted.
He’s saying the same kinds of things. The material hasn’t changed. He’s just angry and bitter. I always struggled with his work because I’m a visual thinker. And there’s just so much semen. So I literally couldn’t see the humour in this waterfall of body fluids. That’s my issue. I never blamed him for that.
But then I think, “Gosh. That’s on his mind a lot too.” The guy clearly had an issue. And that’s sad for him. So why are we trusting a man who has a compulsion like that where it diminishes the humanity of people around him? Why do we care what he thinks about the human condition? He needs to worry about his own condition a bit. Just sit quietly.
Douglas is set to be filmed for Netflix later in the year, likely during Gadsby’s extremely sold out run of shows at the Sydney Opera House in December.
