Louie: Goes to the Dentist and Gets Rapetastic

You ever watch a show and find yourself saying wtf son?  Okay, well maybe not in those exact words, but yeah, that would be "Louie".  "Louie" is the title of Louie C.K.'s new show about his life.  So let me just set the basics.  Louie is a balding divorced man in his forties.  He has two young daughters and his life is a constant pursuit to get laid.  I sort of think of it as the "Leisure Suit Larry" for 2010. Yeah, I know that analogy made me look old, but just shut the hell up about it. This is Louie.

 Well I was raised to be kind to all people, so I will just say there is someone's child.  At any rate, Louie is extremely bizare.  Each episode he starts off with a brief monologue.  Yep, a direct Seinfeld rip off and at times equally awkward.  This week's joke was the following:

Okay here's the the thing, I have two children and the thing that scares me the most is that they disappear.  There is nothing that scares me more than them disappearing; that's every parents worse fear.  Now why do kids disappear sometimes?  I think it is because somebody took them and had sex with them.  And once you have sex with a kid you have to toss them because, people hate folks who have sex with kids -- more than pretty much anybody.  If you murder somebody folks will find you a reason - ah you were upset, you didn't have, you were dehydrated whatever. So if you have sex with a kid you gotta chuck 'em out cause if the kid tell anybody you're screwed.  I can't help thinking that if we could take down a few notches the hatred for kids having sex people, at least you'd get the kid back.  So what I'm trying to say is that the guy could just call you, "Hey I just fucked your kid you want me to take them to soccer or drop them at your house? Does he have any nut allergies cause he just ate some cashew butter?" I know listen, listen, listen to me, listen to me, I know that's hard to hear, I know that's hard to hear but it's true.  It's true, that if we minded child molesting less, less kids would die, that's true.  Now I don't know what to do that information.  I don't have a way to apply that to anything that's helpful.

Did you follow his logic or find anything funny? The thing with comedians, is that they often equate shocking people, and being insensitive to funny.  What the hell is amusing about a child being molested?  Of course, we are supposed to be disarmed by the fact that he is a father, but somehow this makes his whole proposition that much more creepy. I should have hit the stop button right there and then, but how was I know it would turn into the most rapetastic, and stalkerific half hour of television I have seen in a long time?

Louie decides to go to the dentist, but he is terrified.  No, big deal many people have a fear of the dentist.  The dentist then gives Louie a pill to take and some gas along with headphones so that he can listen to middle eastern music.  You guessed it, drugged up Louie takes a trip where he finds himself in the desert talking to Osama Bin Laden about why terrorism is wrong.  Of course, after a brief conversation Osama sees the error of his ways.  The dentist appears out of nowhere and instructs Louie to put a banana into his mouth but not to bite down on it.  Louie begins to choke and when he awakes, the dentist is quickly doing up his pants and adjusting himself.  Without doubt what the audience has just been treated to is a rape joke, because nothing is funnier than being so drugged up that you cannot possibly consent to someone sexually violating you.  Once again, we find Louie playing with a theme that is based on the hurt of so many. Rape is never a laughing matter and to make it the butt of a joke shows an incredible amount of insensitivity.

Over the course of the nine episodes that I have watched thus far, Louie has proven to be one of those racially fauxgressive types of White guy.  You know, the one that says those PC things, but cannot help pointing out that someone is Black.  At any rate, Louis decides to try his hand at a little swirl.  He tries to approach a Black cashier and she clearly blows him off.  Not one to take no for an answer, he goes back into the store and purchases flowers.  When he finishes paying for it, he hands them to her but she refuses to take them, saying she does not know him and calls her manager to issue a refund.  To most reasonable people, this would be a sign of strikig out, but Louie waits for her to finish her shift and again tries to talk to her and she blows him off.  He trails behind her down the street talking awkwardly to get her attention.  They go on the subway and he sits next to her trying to engage her and she again tells him that he has no shot.  When she gets off of the subway, he follows her to her front freaking door.  There is a word for such behaviour and it is called STALKING, but again, Louie C.K. felt fine turning this into a joke.  STALKING is illegal, but hey it's one of those crimes that seems victimless until someone ends up dead.

Okay, the other thing I should point out is that the woman he stalking is Black and this scene reads very much as though he sees her as exotic.  Yeah, didn't you know that fucking a Black woman is on every guy's bucket list?  The fact that he sees her as existing for fulfilling his sexual fantasies couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that White men have been raping Black women for generations and getting away with it, could it? I know, I know, it's only comedy right; I'm making too much of it.  Well, if this isn't just about any Black pussy will do, why did he end up sleeping with the very next Black woman that he sees?  Of course she is loud and makes faces like:

 Yeah, that's attractive isn't it?  But he got what he wanted.  He fucked a Black woman and I guess we should be thankful that he didn't have to stalk this woman and tell her about how White guys might have smaller dicks, they have other worthy attributes.

When I first started watching Louie, I thought that it would be my guilty pleasure. The show that I secretly watched and then denied to everyone; however after the rape is funny episode my social justice nature came to the forefront and I could not turn off the nagging voice in my brain that said very clearly, this shit is not funny.  I am sure that many people laughed at this weeks episode but from my eyes - the eye of a Black woman who has survived rape nothing C.K. did this week was even remotely amusing.  It all served to reduce not only my experience but my physical body.  One day comedy will go back to be funny but I suppose in the meantime, I will have to settle for looking for a guilty pleasure that does not make my skin crawl.