![]() Some figures in comedy also reflect on what they knew, and when, about CK’s behavior, and what should be required for a comeback. In a sit-down interview with him, CK baldly denied any connection to his real life or the by-then rampant rumors. “It almost seemed like a defiance for him to write these scenes,” she said of the film’s dismissal of sexual depredation and public masturbation scenes. Buckley recalls her shock at seeing I Love You, Daddy, a film in which CK plays a man whose teenage daughter dates a 69-year-old artist accused of impropriety. The three Times journalists who broke the story – Melena Ryzik, Cara Buckley and Jodi Kantor (of She Said and Weinstein investigation fame) – briefly survey their reporting methods and the fog of rumors surrounding CK for years before publication, via a Gawker blind item and word of mouth. Cultural critics such as the NYT’s Wesley Morris and Variety’s Alison Herman dispassionately explain CK’s rise to pre-eminence in black, self-referential comedy. Sorry/Not Sorry embeds these testimonies of frustration, revelation and aftermath within the context of CK’s career. And it bothers me that this is my thing.” Like this is going to be in my fucking obituary. And later: “It does bother me that I’m not going to live this down. Sorry/Not Sorry primarily hinges on the accounts of three women who spoke up: comedian Jen Kirkman, one of the first women to publicly (and anonymously) denounce CK’s behavior, and comedy’s sanctioning of it, on her podcast in 2015 the performer and artist Abby Schachner, who told her story of CK masturbating while on the phone with her and was later mocked by Dave Chappelle as having a “brittle-ass spirit” and the comedian and writer Megan Koester, one of the first people to report on CK’s behavior, earning her a verbal lashing from the founder of the Just For Laughs comedy festival in 2015.Īll three relay the stories of CK’s behavior – firsthand experiences for Kirkman and Schachner for Koester, frustration with the comedy scene’s reticence and complicity – with the clarity, wryness and lack of sensationalism that CK’s defenders have lacked. Instead, through a synthesis of talking heads, footage of CK’s performances, old headlines and interviews with women who came forward or reported on his misconduct, the film conveys a missed opportunity on CK’s part for contrition, and for the comedy world at large to speak up in the first place, or change at all. Nor does it argue that CK, who declined to participate in the film, should stop performing comedy. None of this is new information Sorry/Not Sorry, produced in part by the New York Times, brings up several thorny questions but treads little new ground. Earlier this year, he sold out Madison Square Garden. He has continued to make and directly distribute comedy to fans via his website. In 2022, CK won a Grammy award for best comedy special for Sincerely Louis CK. The nearly 90-minute film partially takes its title from CK’s 2021 special Sorry, which treats his past behavior with a shrug and a middle finger, at worst an accidentally revealed kink. Louis CK may no longer be on The Tonight Show or gracing magazine covers, but there has never been a mechanism to keep away a willing audience, which he still has in spades. Sorry/Not Sorry, directed by Caroline Suh and Cara Mones, makes clear what many already know: that cancellation does not really exist. Within nine months, he was back on stage at New York’s venerated Comedy Cellar, igniting questions of how to rehabilitate the disgraced, what counts as repentance, what to do with problematic artists, what has or has not changed. In a note to fans, CK promised to take some time to listen and learn. Netflix, FX and HBO severed ties with him the distributor of I Love You, Daddy, the film CK wrote, directed and starred in – and which featured a character pretending to masturbate in front of others – cancelled its premiere. On the heels of the Times’s bombshell exposé on Harvey Weinstein (the CK article was published a month later) and the nascent #MeToo movement, reaction to the women’s stories was initially swift. Sorry/Not Sorry, a new documentary which premiered at this year’s Toronto film festival, examines both CK’s conduct and cultural reputation as a truth-telling comedy-philosopher of our worst impulses, as well as the backlash – or lack thereof – to his behavior.
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