Hannah Gadsby has decided to slam Louis C.K. in a new Los Angeles Times interview [via Source]
C.K. — whose career got derailed last year after it was revealed that he was a chronic public serial masturbator -- has been trying to mount a comeback by performing stand-up at NYC's legendary Comedy Cellar club.
Of course, if you’re up-to-date with the stand-up comedy world, and social media for that matter, you would know that Gadsby is the Aussie “comedian” whose Netflix special “Nanette,” sparked heavy debate about female and male relations in the #MeToo era. It ended with Gadsby literally dropping the mic and retiring from comedy (that clearly hasn’t happened since she now has a new Netflix special). “Nanette” started off as comedy routine but quickly evolved into a personal reflection of her life in Australia and the sexual abuse she encountered with family and friends. At some point after “Nanette,” Gadbsy was all that people were talking about in comedy, sparking fervent conversation on social media.
If you remember, after being accused of masturbating in front of fellow female comedians, C.K. promised in 2017 to “step back and take a long time to listen,” but that hiatus was short-lived as he returned to stand-up comedy at the end of 2018 and made headlines with routines which openly mocked transgender people, Parkland shooting survivors, and even his own controversial actions towards women.
Attacking Louis C.K. as “a joke” in her recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Gadbsy added “I think it’s important to keep making that joke. 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.”
“Why are we trusting a man who has a compulsion like that where it diminishes the humanity of people around him?” Gadsby said. “Why do we care what he thinks about the human condition? He needs to worry about his own condition a bit. Just sit quietly.”
Gadsby also added that C.K’s actions are because he is “just angry and bitter.” Yes, but hasn’t he always been? Has she not seen every single stand-up routine he’s done the last 10 years? He gets his laugh off his own bitter and angry persona.
If you remember, one of the women that defended C.K. was fellow comedian Sarah Silverman, who told Howard Stern that C.K. masturbated in front of her, but that it was with her consent.
“I know I’m going to regret saying this,” Silverman said. “I’ve known Louis forever, I’m not making excuses for him, so please don’t take this that way. We are peers. We are equals. When we were kids, and he asked if he could masturbate in front of me, sometimes I’d go, ‘Fuck yeah I want to see that!’… It’s not analogous to the other women that are talking about what he did to them. He could offer me nothing. We were only just friends. Sometimes, yeah, I wanted to see it, it was amazing. Sometimes I would say, ‘Fucking no, gross,’ and we got pizza.”
Silverman then went on to add that, even before the NYT expose on him broke, C.K. had called up his victims to apologize to them, “even in that article they talk about how he went on tried to connect with some of these women to say he fucked up and wronged them.”
Meanwhile, C.K. is touring for most of the coming year, selling out shows left and right, unscathed by the social media hounds that want him to shut up and go back to his censored dark corner.