Funny man

Jason Zinoman has an article (with photos) in The New York Times about one of Rico's favorite comics:

The ascension of Louis C. K. from a comic’s comic to show business saint (a description used by more than one of his legion of admirers) brings with it what the comedian himself might call “white-people problems.”
Namely, can an artist so wildly acclaimed, popular and wealthy still portray himself as a working-class loser? Once Chuck Klosterman compares your television show to Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, it’s not easy to play the Everyman.
The comic confronts this issue early in his excellent new self-produced stand-up special, Louis CK Live at the Beacon Theater, when he confesses to flying first class. “I’m not like you,” he said in this one-hour special, which has already made a startling $750,000 profit on five dollar downloads after about a week. “All the things you do, I do better versions of those things.”
In an earlier incarnation of this joke, told at the Bell House in Brooklyn, Louis C. K., wearing his usual rumpled jeans and black t-shirt, owned up to some anxiety about success, wondering aloud if he would be harder to relate to. Then he shrugged nonchalantly.
Louis C. K., a dedicated and resourceful student of the form, has never been afraid to evolve. His early material had a boldly absurdist streak that gradually faded as his work became more frankly personal, particularly about fatherhood. In his recent shows he doesn’t talk about being poor, once a staple subject, and now that he’s famous and divorced, he stopped making jokes about never having sex, which is a pity, since he excels at them. His new material represents a return to a different kind of cerebral style. It’s more psychologically probing, intricate and fantastical in narrative, and morally direct.
He has increasingly moved the playing field of his stories from the real world to the goings-on inside his head. You can also see this change in the difference between his shamefully underrated 2006 HBO sitcom, Lucky Louie, which presented the grim financial challenges and unglamorous sex life of a working-class dad, and his current FX hit, Louie, a more freewheeling production whose lingering close-ups and dream sequences signal a more subjective perspective.
There are still quick jokes about encounters in elevators and adventures in parenting in his new show, but its highlights hinge on elaborate set pieces in which experiences rooted in the real world are jumping-off points for the overheated dramas of his imagination. Many of these jokes present him as an unreliable narrator. Consider one about a gay club owner he worked for early in his career who he says wanted to sleep with him. At the end, he exposes his own view as false and rooted in homophobia: “The whole story really was: There once was a gay man.”
Louis C. K. is also a master of the operatic revenge fantasy, a comedic Quentin Tarantino. In his last special, Hilarious, he imagines getting back at someone: “I hope a person who loved her most dropped her off a cliff and Superman picked her up and dropped her higher.” He managed to top that with an elaborate series of punishments imagined for a first-grade classmate of his daughter. These include seducing both of the child’s parents just to break their hearts and damage their psyches.
The most striking forays into his thought process are examinations of his own moral failures. He says “I would like to be a better person” several times. The story about flying first class is a reflection about how he often sees members of the military in coach and thinks about giving them his seat, but never does. But that doesn’t stop him from luxuriating in the notion of doing a good deed, feeling proud of his fantasy.
The incongruity between thought and action is at the heart of his comedy. As Neil LaBute does with the ineffectual men in his works, he dramatizes the problems of passivity. He does so by focusing on his failings. “I have a list of beliefs,” he says, “and I live by none of them.”
Any close observer of Louis C. K. knows that there has always been a moral underpinning to his musings about fatherhood, language and prejudice, but in this new special he lays out his philosophy explicitly. “You should act in a way that if everyone acted that way, it would be all right,” he says, probably getting as close as any stand-up comic in history to using Kant’s categorical imperative in service of a joke.
No assertion says as much about his convictions as the act of letting Dane Cook have the most forceful point in the best-known scene on Louie last season. In an exchange entirely written by Louis C. K., Cook attacks him for keeping quiet while Cook’s reputation was damaged by what he describes as false accusations of stealing jokes: “You let your name be used to hurt me,” he said, articulating how inaction can be just as hurtful as a bad act.
Louis C. K. has said that giving the opposing side the best argument is a dramatic tactic, but it’s also a moral one. Call it comic empathy. In One Night Stand, his first televised special, from 2005, Louis C. K. made a joke about disliking both George W. Bush and John Kerry because rich politicians have no idea what it’s like to be poor. Poor people, however, he explains, know exactly what it’s like to be rich “because they fantasize about it constantly”. The joke is about the rich life they plan (“I’m going to have a house made of chocolate”), but the serious subtext is that trying to see things from a remote perspective is a virtue.
The extremely funny new special lives up to the hype. It’s essential viewing for comedy fans, even if it isn’t his funniest special. My vote on that count is for Hilarious, although One Night Stand ends with his most virtuosic joke, an ingenious dialogue with his daughter who can’t stop asking Why? But what makes this latest work so impressive and encouraging is this insight: No matter how successful he may be, Louis C. K. can always be a loser in his own mind.

Rico says the guy's just plain funny...