Comedy reviews seem to be all the rage on this blog at the moment, so I thought I'd reprint a review I wrote for London-ers in November 2009 after seeing the mighty Louis CK at the Bloomsbury Theatre. The man's a master comedy craftsman, so check him out if you ever get the chance.
Stand-up comedy might just be the ultimate popular American art form. I use the word 'popular' because that allows me to neatly sidestep jazz, which is definitely art but certainly isn't popular. Nobody actually likes jazz, do they? They just like the idea of liking jazz. Yeah, I went there. Suck it, Mingus.
It's true that British stand-ups like Billy Connolly, Eddie Izzard and Lee Evans can stand tall in the weird, deformed line-up of legendary live comedians. But no other country has quite the same heritage as the US, from Lenny Bruce in the early '60s to Richard Pryor and George Carlin in the '70s to Bill Hicks to Chris Rock to Dave Chappelle to Sarah Silverman in a long, steadily evolving line of funny. Maybe it's North America's isolation as a continent; maybe it's that stereotype of American bullishness. Whatever the case, the Americans sure know how to stand up in a packed room and shout an audience to its knees.
Louis CK absolutely deserves his place in that pantheon of American stand-ups. He's been touring the US comedy circuit for two decades, filling the gaps with writing and acting for TV and films. If you've seen him anywhere this year, you'll have seen him in Ricky Gervais' mostly underwhelming directorial debut The Invention of Lying. His acting career has been peppered with cancelled shows and movie flops, but maybe it's better that way. CK clearly shines brightest from a stage with a mic in his hand.
Tonight, the Bloomsbury's filled to bursting with fans (including Steve Merchant, who thankfully didn't sit in front of me) expecting a dose of CK's winning blend of traditional observational comedy and foul-mouthed commentary. If the man is exhausted from his schedule (or the first gig he played at the Bloomsbury just before our late set), he doesn't show it. The audience is firmly in stitches for the duration.
Content-wise, there's nothing new here, CK visiting such well-cropped comedy pastures as air travel, fatherhood and dating. But what makes him such a compelling performer is his ability to take these comedy tropes and rejuvenate them, whether with sly subversion, deft wordplay or pure throat-straining commitment. His descriptions, like that of the middle-class urbanite who doesn't speak but somehow "secretes words out of his head", are dead-on. Just as the audience is lulled into a sense of familiarity with a bit about CK volunteering to help supervise lunch at his daughter's elementary school, he sucker punches us into shocked hysterics by calmly noting that in the event of a fire he'd happily trample other children to save his own.
The benign glint in CK's eye ensures that this isn't a Frankie Boyle-esque aggressive comedy barrage. He's toying with the audience's expectations, tempering pessimism with playfulness while still giving the material enough edge to draw gasps now and then. The word that springs to mind watching CK's set is 'craft'. CK has had 20 years to hone his, and he's seen enough audiences to be able to read us like a book. After all, as any comedy craftsman knows, it's not about the material. It's about the delivery.
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