Sarah Silverman shocked many today by defending Louis C.K. in the strangest way imaginable.
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.
Silverman appeared on today's episode of Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show and was asked about C.K., whom she's known for many years and who is a good friend of hers. Silverman told Stern that C.K. masturbated in front of her, but that it was totally 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 admitted that they would also sometimes strip naked in C.K.’s apartment and throw their clothes out the window onto the street and "proceed to go down the elevator naked to retrieve them."
Why is Silverman pointing all of this out for the world to know? Well, because she claims that maybe C.K. failed to understand what was appropriate and inappropriate when he was asking to masturbate in front of female comedians. “Once he became powerful, even within just his [comedy] community, he felt like he was the same person, but the dynamic was different and it was not OK,” Silverman said.
Silverman then went on to say that, even before the NYT exposee on him broke and there was even any knowledge of it existing, 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,” Silverman said.
“I’m not saying everyone should embrace Louis again,” the comedian continued. “I believe he has remorse. I just want him to talk about it on stage. He’s going to have to find his way or not find his way.”
Criterion's December lineup has some great additions to the library, but the title that jumped out at me is Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," which officially joins the Collection on December 8.