What Does Louis CK’s Return Mean for #MeToo?

So much has happened in the months since the Harvey Weinstein news first broke and we were all ushered into a new, awakened, #MeToo era. It’s been nearly a year. Countless more stories have come out since. The world has shifted. We wonder, hope, pray that it will last. That less will be tolerated. That more will be shared. That toxic masculinity may, by even the tiniest of measures, finally start to crumble.

And then Louis CK, just ten months after we learned that he masturbated in front of several female subordinates at work, confidently reenters the public arena. And I don’t mean stepping out for an ice cream. I mean, stepping in front of a microphone to do a comedy act without so much as a second spent acknowledging his god-awful behaviour.

“It sounded just like he was trying to work out some new material, almost like any time of the last 10 years he would come in at the beginning of a new act,” the owner of the Comedy Cellar, where CK performed a surprise set Sunday night, told the New York Times.

I know what you’re thinking. A room full of progressive, West Village-frequenting New Yorkers would have certainly booed him off the stage, right? WELL. Not quite. The crowd of 115 or so reportedly applauded him before he even began his set. Mo Amer, another comedian who performed that night, said it was “a wow moment.” This makes me deeply, helplessly sad, because one, I really thought New Yorkers were better than that and two, is it really that easy? A few months ago, my colleague and I wrote about the inevitability of comebacks in the #MeToo era. “I can’t help but feel that these comebacks are going to be quietly, deftly attempted in various ways and with various men, just to see what the public pushback is,” I wrote at the time. “[S]ome of the comebacks are going to sail by, and some aren’t, and I think the powers that be are willing to take a few gambles to see what works and what doesn’t.” So, yeah, while I did accept that disgraced men would attempt to return to public life sooner or later, I did not expect anything quite so brazen and unrepentant, so devoid of observable guilt and shame. (For a comedian whose career was built on self-deprecation and supposed self-analysis, it’s stranger still.) So in what capacity are we willing to accept these comebacks? At the very least with a mea culpa, and at most with a demonstrable display of demons wrestled, lessons learned, and behaviours recalibrated.

“I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen,” CK wrote in a statement after the misconduct news first broke. I guess for him “a long time” meant anything shy of a year, and “listening” really just meant keeping his mouth shut for a bit until it was safe to talk again, and pretend like nothing happened. Where is the growth, the understanding and the introspection we hoped the #MeToo era would birth? It seems, if you’re a once-beloved white dude, none of that is required to be embraced once more by the spotlight. Matt Lauer seems to just be biding his time too, as is Charlie Rose. And now, seeing the warm response CK got, maybe they’ll feel emboldened to take the first step.

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