Louis CK releases ‘Ridiculous’ special and ‘Ingram’ book

These days, CK occupies a strange place in culture. He’s on the hook for cancellation, joined by the likes of Chris Brown and Andrew Cuomo. CK isn’t too canceled to perform several sold-out shows at Beacon, but it’s canceled enough that, if you manage to snag a ticket, you might not want to show it off to your co-workers. It’s been canceled enough that, if the show was one of his strongest routines in years, you could write about it, but not without pointing out that it’s a shame.

Coming back is harder for some than others. Even at the height of the #MeToo era, we decided that some people were eventual candidates for rehabilitation and then set them aside for later, like unfinished tasks. But we haven’t figured out exactly what this return process should look like. A public apology is required. Then maybe that person should go away for a while. (We seem to imagine the canceled person is living in a basement somewhere, “Bogonia” style, when it’s more likely a private island — a yoga spa — or, like, New Hampshire.) While they’re gone, they may want to get some form of treatment — therapy, rehab. Then, after we’ve forgotten they even existed, they should give us a masterpiece, channeling the worst things they’ve ever done, their crushing guilt and shame, and their newfound clarity into the best content they’ve ever made.

Maybe this is where CK went wrong. After a nine-month exile, he resumed performing in comedy clubs in New York, and later in Europe. In 2020, he funded a special titled “Sincerely Louis CK”, in which he spoke publicly about his misdeeds for the first time on stage but failed to do so in a way that lived up to the special’s title. “I learned a lot,” he said. “I learned how to eat alone in a restaurant while people pointed their fingers at me from across the room.” He later explained: “I like to masturbate. I don’t like to be alone.” “I’m good at that too. If you’re good at juggling, you won’t do it alone in the dark,” he added.

A year later, CK filmed a special titled “Sorry” — apparently in response to criticism that he did not use the word in his public apology, which instead relied on words like “remorseful” and “regretful.” That discontent carried over into the special itself, which didn’t address the situation at all — a meta-joke — but included some of the best comedy CK had ever done, including a discussion of a news story about an obese woman who had to go to the zoo to get an MRI and an extended discussion of “What about apples?” A scene from the movie “Good Will Hunting.”

This is CK at its best. The weakest parts of “Ridiculous” are actually the crude, one-off parts: CK seems unable to talk about a child without making a joke about pedophilia; He has a habit of mentioning and then sexualizing his late mother. Although some critics have pointed out that it’s difficult to laugh at these types of jokes now, because they rely on the audience’s confidence that CK isn’t really creepy, even ignorant viewers may find these jokes boring. They are lazy. It’s like wearing a suit and then matching it with Crocs.

CK’s strongest jokes are driven by his eccentric style of observation, his focus on strange aspects of life that the rest of us have never noticed, have never been able to express, or are accustomed to ignoring. In “Ridiculous,” he depicts the strangeness of being an empty nester through an anecdote about “these two ladies”—his two daughters—who come in intermittently, and are essentially unrecognizable. (“It’s like having a cat that turned into a postman.”) He objects to repeating the oath in the courtroom, which must end with the witness promising to “tell the truth.” (What’s the business of “The Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth”?) He wonders why donut boxes have windows. He talks about the worst feeling in the world being waking up on a plane. There’s something amusing, and perhaps admirable, about someone using his platform — a platform he briefly lost and was trying to get back — to comment on chicken packaging.

When my friends and I arrived at the Lighthouse to see the movie “Ridiculous,” there was a long line of people waiting to buy drinks, but there was no one in line waiting to buy a signed copy of CK’s first novel, “Ingram,” which had just been released. We asked the cashier what she knew about the book. All she said was that the protagonist had a difficult life: “A lot of things happen to him.” That seemed like a disappointing description, although I later found out he was dead. Ingram is a boy, perhaps ten or so, who lives on a farm in rural Texas, where his parents force him to sleep in a shed. The farm is at risk of repossession; Ingram’s father slaughters almost all the animals, then rides his horse into town to sell it. He will never come back. The family soon runs out of food, leaving Ingram’s mother with only one choice. Ingram explains, “My mother took me out of the house onto the porch and gave me some pork that she tied in a piece of cloth, and said, ‘You have to go away, Ingram. There is no home or family here now.

And so Ingram heads out. Comedian Theo Vaughn compared the book, with its lost child hero, to the emotional “Huck Finn.” “The themes and settings are also reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner; CK said he was inspired by Flannery O’Connor. But what he has produced is something closer to the relentless torture of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, without the beautiful prose and complex characters. On his long walk to nowhere, Ingram endures hunger, thirst, extreme poverty, various injuries and occasional beatings. While bathing in a stream, he is swept away by the current and narrowly escapes Waterfall; he arrives in Houston naked. Later, he is struck by a hurricane, breaks his arm and loses several months’ worth of earnings. Throughout the book, he encounters a series of temporary father figures, all of whom disappear or die, often brutally. When he finally gets some stability – working in the oil fields outside Austin – an explosion occurs, killing ninety-seven men. Ingram barely escapes.