Louis CK, dark humor, and misdirection

Louis CK is currently at the peak of his long career, which started with Louis playing at small venues in Boston in his early 20's. His show, "Louis" on FX received an Emmy nomination for best comedy; his most recent stand-up special, Live at the Beacon Theatre, which Louis produced and distributed himself, sold more than 220,000 copies in 10 days; and, more importantly, comics and followers regard Louis CK as the most "hilarious," authentic, and sincere comedian around. I count myself among his admirers.

If there's one adjective that most people (minus all the ones who don't watch Louis CK) use to describe Louis, it's "dark." (Here I'll focus on his stand-up, because the series, "Louis", is distinct in many ways from his stand-up for its development of "anti-comedy" - "the art of making us uncomfortable", according to one reviewer.) For example, in Louis' last two specials, "Hilarious" (available on Netflix, as of this posting) and Live at the Beacon Theatre, he opens with a joke about the inevitability of death. In "Hilarious", he says "hello everybody," and adds the caveat that he should really say "everybody here", because "most people are not here, by a pretty huuuge majority." Actually, he points out, "most people are dead," and that we'll be dead "way longer" than we'll be alive. Punchline: "You're just dead people who haven't died yet." (This, as it turns out, is actually true. In 2007, demographers estimated the world population to be 6.5 billion, and the number of people ever born to be about 106 billion.)  In Live at the Beacon theatre, he notes that the size of the audience, about 2,500 people, is large enough to constitute a (non-random) sample of the US population. (Most national surveys aim for 1,000 to 3,000 respondents). Inferring from this observation, he tells the audience that "not all of ya are gonna make it to Christmas...At least one person is going to ruin their family's Christmas by dying a shitty death." The joke kills--the audience bursts into laughter and applause.

Both of these jokes are clearly instances of dark humor, turning a subject normally associated with pain and/or suffering into a joke. So what makes these two jokes funny?  In both instances, Louis leads up to a punchline that for the most part is based on a valid premise/observation - most people are dead and the audience is large enough to constitute a sample of the population (although it's non-random). Both true. More importantly, there is also an element of misdirection in both jokes, saying something unexpected based on the previous statement or string of statements. Louis turns an innocuous "hello everybody" into a joke about how the largest proportion of "everybody" is the dead proportion, and an observation about the size of the audience into a joke about the inevitability of at least one person in the audience dying before Christmas.

This combination of misdirection and dark humor is very common. Anthony Jezelnik's act is, at least from what I've seen, entirely based on this device. This might explain why he's so successful as a Comedy Central roaster (see video below), when the roasters are trying to turn the roastee's fame into an object of derision. This usually takes the form of the comic opening with a harmless or even complimentary statement about the roastee, and follows it with an insult or an observation about a dark topic related to the initial statement (see video below). Great stuff for roasts. In this joke form, the misdirection gives the punchline, well, it's punch. By introducing an innocuous subject, the comic creates expectations about what is to follow that, if done well, they completely turn on their head.

While these jokes can be really funny, they get old quickly, which is why I generally find it tiring and redundant watching Jezelnik's standup. Most of Louis' stand-up doesn't rely on this joke form, but they're great ice-breakers. In the next post, I'll discuss the real brilliance of Louis' *standard* joke form, and decompose one or two emblematic jokes.