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The latest to release quarantine-era entertainment? Louis C.K.

April 4, 2020 at 5:52 p.m. EDT
Louis C.K. is attempting a post-#MeToo comeback in the age of coronavirus. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Bob Woodruff Foundation)

Louis C.K. was shunned by Hollywood in the fall of 2017 in the wake of a #MeToo scandal. His distributor yanked his new film, his stand-up work stopped and many critics and activists said he should be canceled.

But the comedian is now making a bid at a comeback. And he’s doing it via streaming, a platform with added resonance at a moment when many Americans are quarantined to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

C.K. on Saturday released "Sincerely Louis CK " a special in which he takes on a host of new topics, including the #MeToo scandal. Available only on his Web site, the special costs $7.99 to view, which entitles the buyer both to download it or stream it for a year. No Hollywood distributor is involved.

C.K. said the quarantine gave added impetus to its release.

“I feel like there are two kinds of people in this world,” he wrote in an email to a fan mailing list. “One kind needs to laugh when things get [bad]....The other kind of people feel that it’s important to put aside laughter in times of difficulty and give serious and painful things the respect and the silence due to them.

“I don’t think that either one of these kinds of people is right over the other,” he wrote, as he provided a link to his Web site to buy the special. "I can only say that I belong to the first group.” He did not address the #MeToo scandal, in which five women accused him of masturbating in front of them, in the email.

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The material was recorded at an appearance at Washington D.C.'s Warner Theatre last month, the last stop of a comedy tour cut short by quarantining. C.K. had initially intended to stop in Boston, his hometown, and record the material there for a release later in 2020. But quarantines accelerated the schedule.

The comedian has been selling out comedy venues around the country in recent months. But they tend to hold one or two thousand people, and are not the bigger play that streaming venture has been designed as. C.K. — who before the scandal routinely sold out the likes of Madison Square Garden — has a fan list of some 500,000 people to which he sent the promotional email.

The release of the special raises a host of social questions, including the interest of a broad public in the new work of the most prominent alleged #MeToo perpetrators, particularly at a moment of national reckoning and community over the pandemic.

The material comes at a moment when entertainment personalities from Rosie O’Donnell to Michael Shannon have been using the Web as a way to connect with consumers during the pandemic. The pieces are a bet that the isolation of quarantines and the intimacy of the medium will provide a popular recipe, a gamble that has thus far proved correct. Whether audiences will include C.K. in this group, as he evidently hopes they will, remains an open question.

C.K. via a representative declined to comment.

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A larger comeback bid has been in the works for some time. Saturday’s message follows an email C.K. sent several months ago to the same list saying that he would continue to use that platform and that anyone who wished to unsubscribe is invited to do so. He included an unsubscribe button prominently on the message. About 25,000, or 5 percent, did, according to a person familiar with the list who was not authorized to speak publicly.

In November 2017, as the #MeToo movement was taking root, the New York Times published a story documenting the accusations. C.K., who’d denied them in the past, did not comment for that story. But soon after, he released a statement admitting the truth of the allegations and apologizing to the women. He noted the women had given him permission but said he now understood that was not sufficient.

“The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly.” He also said he had come to realize “the extent to which I left these women who admired me feeling badly about themselves and cautious around other men who would never have put them in that position.

“There is nothing about this that I forgive myself for," he added. “And I have to reconcile it with who I am. Which is nothing compared to the task I left them with.” He concluded by saying he would take a “step back and take a long time to listen,” then mostly vanished from public life.

In the special CK alluded several times to his life since the scandal (“I was doing a show in Poland —because I had to go to Poland to do shows”) as he worked through typically provocative material about religion, parents and sexual taboos. He occasionally mocked his situation while avoiding a repentant tone (“I learned a lot. I learned how to eat alone in a restaurant with people giving me the finger from across the room.”).

The comedian addressed the scandal most fully in several minutes at the end of the hourlong set, in which he cast his actions as part of a universally recognizable set of closed-door sexual habits.

"Everybody’s got their thing. I don’t know what your thing is...do you understand how lucky you are that people don’t know your....thing? Because everybody knows my thing. Obama knows my thing. Do you understand how that feels?”

He then put the issue in the context of consent. “Whatever your thing is, if you want to do it with somebody else first you need to ask, but if they say yes you still don’t get to say ‘Woo’ and charge ahead. You got to check in. I guess that’s what I would say--check in. Like, men are taught to make sure the woman is OK but the thing is women know how to seem OK when they’re not OK."

Other comedians who’ve faced #MeToo allegations, such as Aziz Ansari, have released specials in recent months. But their prominence, the allegations and, maybe most significantly, the pre-coronavirus social context have all been significantly different from the instance of the Louis C.K. release.

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C.K. is in a rare position when it comes to streaming. He successfully provided material directly to consumers long before the form was established as a major corporate category. In 2011, C.K. sold a special he had recorded at New York’s Beacon Theatre directly to consumers. He charged $5 and pocketed as much as $750,000 in personal profit.

He has since joined up with many of the largest players for specials, including Netflix and HBO, and produced and starred in material for FX, before returning to the direct model Saturday.