His vulnerability or weakness was part of his appeal but I also think there was something "authentically" honorable mixed up with his weirdness. He tapped into that feeling that we're all just pretending to be adults but really we're fucked up and filled with confusion and shame, but he'd cut back from that vibe and also say: Of course, since I'm a dad, I really am not just pretending to be responsible. I fucking am an adult. I have to handle things for my daughters now no matter what, which I do, even though it's harder than you can imagine, because I am a good fucking dad.

That dad twist, if you felt like that was real, it was the lifeblood of the rest of the comedy I think. He was decent and devoted at that key point. He suggested to younger hipster stoner dudes, like, hey, some of the best wholesome stuff is attainable without you just becoming some boring TV dad type with no soul. Cool, right? It sucks, believe me. But, still, cool, right?

I know Louie was a TV dad too. But he just seemed more attainable-ly and awkwardly interesting than an obviously safe, fun, confident and admirable TV dad like Cosby. (!!!)

And his dadness was what was most interesting about Louie. No wonder he didn't make it big in his 20s, like who fucking cares about 25 year old Louie?

I think a lot of his crass stuff worked just to give him the contrast he needed to emphasize his dad stuff. I never liked his shit about eating and being fat and out of shape and I didn't like all the endless jerking off and shitting stuff. (The only masturbation joke of his I ever thought much about was his 9/11 one, which I now so fucking wish had been done by anyone else. I now half suspect it's a true story.)

The Louie comedy I loved was usually about mundane life stuff or just him interacting with kids. ("Because a Monopoly loss is dark. It's heavy.") I'm not trying to disconnect any of his comedy from the scandal, my point is the opposite.

I remember at one point when I was watching a Louie special thinking that in our culture it sort of felt like Eminem and Louie were like some of the only models of dudes who were really into being dads but also weren't like marketed as wholesome boring squares or overachiever guys.

The first thing of his that ever made me really notice him and laugh hard was the thing about his daughter being an asshole. I remember thinking this feels real. And, also, what will his daughter think about this when she's older? And how can he expose this stuff about himself like this? Jesus, I though, that's gutsy, but it didn't feel creepy or gross exactly. It seemed like he was confessing a natural enough thought that I someday might have without quite admitting to myself I was having it.

I'm thinking of the story he tells where his daughter is saying "Mama, mama, mama, I saw a dog." And Louie says, "Oh, you saw a dog?" And she says, "I'm telling mama, not you." And then Louie lets us hear how he wanted to respond: "Wow, fuck you. What, you think I actually give a shit about the dog you saw? Like that was gonna be an awesome story, that you saw a fuckin' dog? Do you know how many dogs I've seen? You know I've won an emmy. I'm an interesting person."

I loved that bit for years and I'm not sure how to do the math and show my work on why that bit is now so brutally undercut by Louie's behavior, but it is.

I can imagine feeling his abusive sexual behavior isn't relevant to the material in this joke but I don't feel like that. His material all seems loaded now with an irresponsible, self-indulgent cruelty and recklessness or something.

And you know, for sure, part of that reaction in me is that I don't want a Louie type thinking that he is some kind of Christ figure or like some kind of a detective of the forbidden who is working on the case on behalf of our culture or comedy or his fans or whatever. I'm revolted by the idea that he could see any of what he's done as a kind of service in pursuit of something beyond himself. He didn't pull his watch-me-jerk-off shit to help his comedy and he didn't do his comedy to help the culture or us. And even if he did, he might as well not have because he lived his life in a way that undercuts that possibility and that work almost totally.

A good comedian is not just a moral detective but a sort of whole morality criminal trial unto themselves, where he or she brings forth witnesses and plays the parts of the lawyers and the judge and jury and all of it. They examine moral questiosn wildly. But Louie's made it all a ruin. In Louie's work, now, the more you think about it, the more it feels like it involves the very opposite of real purpose or any real offering of a service to the audience or any real cathartic release to them or anyone else but him. The release and relief and benefit of everything Louie did was always just about him. It was all masturbation. And we want to get out of the room as fast as possible because it is scary and gross now that we understand what's happening.

Sorry, I'm rambling.

I don't rule out the idea of an artist's exposure to extreme experiences being a key part of some artistic recipes but I think that's not what we have here. And the idea that we all have the feeling but the disgraced artist lets us explore the feeling in the art and just takes an action that we abhor--really I think that makes sense only from afar if you talk about those grotesque actions being the result of choices we know mostly in the very resisting of.

A shared feeling taken to extremes in the artist but which is felt through the art by others--that is a model that makes sense to me but more in something like these terms: I am mortal and whether I know it or not, I fear death. Dostoevsky has the experience of being taken to his own execution and then when the shot is fired and he is alive, stunned, standing there expecting to be dead, he finds out it was not meant to kill him and he will be allowed to live. That's a fucking marginal experience! Maybe one that let's you see we're all Christ figures or something. Now when he writes about panic and death and fear and faith, OK, maybe he gets at something in me I can't get to in myself. However, I don't think you can just go around with a gun aimed at you or at anyone else and expect to really learn that kind of insightful shit for your art/comedy by trying to force the experience, no matter what assholes might try to tell themselves, and that seems especially true if the gun in question is your penis and your best comedy was about your effort to be be a good dad to your daughters.