Louis CK
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Along with such comedy geniuses as Robert Smigel and Dino Stamatopoulos, Louis CK is a master of sketch comedy. That’s why it will be very interesting when his sitcom, Lucky Louie, premieres on HBO. Not only is CK applying his comedic skills to the sitcom but it will be the first time he is stretching himself as an actor.

Lucky Louie premieres on HBO June 11

Daniel Robert Epstein: What is Lucky Louie like?

Louis CK: It’s a multi camera sitcom performed in front of a live audience. It is a very traditional half hour of stories about a family but since it’s on HBO we’re able to go in some directions other folks have a hard time going in. There are no commercial breaks which means we don’t need to structure shows the way some people do and obviously there’s no language barrier. I play a guy who works in a muffler shop and my wife is a nurse. We raise our kid, I hang out with my friends and fight with my wife.

DRE: Did you create it?

CK: I created it, star in it and I’m the executive producer. I wrote some of the episodes but I also have a partner, Mike Royce, who came on once the pilot got picked up. He and I run the writing room together though when I’m acting in the show it’s more his room than mine.

DRE: What made you want do a sitcom?

CK: A lot of the material I’ve been doing on stage has been about having kids and being married. It just lends itself naturally to writing a script about it. I did a sitcom pilot on CBS that was less fun because we had to make saleable. But doing any show on HBO was something I really wanted do.

DRE: Did CBS try to get you to put an old person in there?

CK: I don’t remember that so much. They ended up going with John Goodman and Jason Alexander’s shows, so they were looking for star material. But it was good because I got to learn how to do a pilot over there. But here at HBO, it’s more what I wanted to do and it’s a little more authentic. The idea of doing a more traditional family sitcom for an audience, but with no network and FCC barriers was very exciting to me.

DRE: You have some comedians on the writing staff as well.

CK: Yes Greg Fitzsimmons is one of the writers on the show along with about six or seven other people.

DRE: Have you ever written a sitcom that was on the air?

CK: No.

DRE: Is the show going to be deconstructionist at all?

CK: No, I’m not really interested in doing that. That’s boring to me. The shows that are like this that I have liked are The Honeymooners and All in the Family and maybe two or three others. There hasn’t really been a good one in a while and from my point of view, most shows that do multicamera with a studio audience run away from the audience and usually end up putting laughs in. But for me, capturing it with a real audience with comedic characters and comedic actors is really fucking fun to watch when you do it right. I haven’t seen it done right in a while. Going through the network paces, I’ve seen how it gets dissolved with testing. But we’re not trying to reinvent it or satirize it. We’re not making fun of sitcoms. I don’t really give a shit about that.

DRE: What’s the plot of the pilot episode?

CK: It’s hard to talk about them that way. We did one episode where my wife and I are having sex and she has an orgasm and she realizes she hasn’t had one before. She realizes she wasn’t having orgasms so it changes our sex life.

DRE: The audience must be shocked. How does something like that play in front of a live audience?

CK: Yeah they’re shocked. We’re in bed together and we’re not glamorous people but you don’t see any nudity. You see my big naked chest but you don’t see her tits or anything, because tits aren’t funny. Occasionally there’s some male nudity. Female nudity is titillating and not funny but male nudity is funny. We stayed away from a lot of things sitcoms have done. There’s no couch in our sitcom, no big living room, no fucking foosball machine under a skylight. We’re having sex in a shittily lit drab apartment. The kitchen has just a table and chairs. Everything’s very claustrophobic because we’re a low income family and neither of us are very glamorous people. I don’t even shower half the time on show nights. I wear no makeup, no one does my hair and I’m heavyset. My wife is similar, although she’s a lot better looking. We’re there having sex and it’s funny because it’s not cool sex, it’s not hot young people; it’s just married people having sex. I’m struggling to get her to come, it’s pretty funny.

DRE: Was HBO confused as to why you want to do this kind of show with them?

CK: No, they were interested in the same thing. The stuff I’ve done onstage recently has been all about being a father, being a husband and is just an honest approach about what goes into that shit. That’s what my act is. That’s what I’ve been doing onstage and that’s what I get off on talking about. So this is just another form of that.

DRE: Your half hour special was very family oriented. When was your first kid born?

CK: I’ve got two girls and my first daughter was born in 2001. I started talking about being married shortly after I got married, but after the kids came was when I really started talking about that stuff. For me it was blowing off steam because I didn’t expect the stuff to work in front of real audiences. Saying stuff like “I understand babies being thrown in the garbage now, whereas before I didn’t” I expected to be booed onstage. But audiences full of soccer moms and people were finding great release in the honesty of that. I’ve found that when you watch shows where people are saying fuck and being edgy, which is a word I’ve grown to hate, the families of the world are left being very polite and very cool to one another, very Christian. The fact is when you have kids you realize that you’re still very dark and fucked up but now you just have children. You have a responsibility that means a lot more. I don’t really care about the comedy I was doing before I was doing this stuff, because there was no real stakes in it. Yeah, I was a single guy living in America making some observations about life. But when I started to raise kids I realized it was a lot more meaningful. There’s a lot of pressure. So the humor that comes out of it is something people share and get off on.

DRE: How many episodes have you done?

CK: We’ve shot 12 episodes plus the pilot.

DRE: How do you like the sitcom process?

CK: You got to tell a different story every week. It’s hard for me because I’m acting and writing at the same time, but it’s fun. Really exhilarating.

DRE: Have you ever acted before?

CK: No, not at all. But I love it because I’m there with an audience. It’s just like I’m doing standup but I’m acting it out with other people. I’ve never acted before because I can’t audition. There’s no audience when you audition for stuff, just you in a room, and I have no target if there’s no audience, which is why we geared the show the way we did. The show is really meant to key in the audience. Most shows use 24 P video which is meant to look like film, sitcoms that you see on film to me are just very detached looking, but I like I said, I like shows like All in the Family which was shot on very cheap shitty videotape. We use the same thing so it looks like an older style TV show. We make sure that the set is very close to the audience so you really feel them and we don’t put in laughs where they don’t exist. If jokes bomb then they just bomb.

DRE: Who came up with having the show look like an old TV show?

CK: That was me. I know a lot about this kind of stuff. I’ve made films and I like tech stuff so I’ve always been into the way stuff looks, so I did the research. HBO wanted to do whatever we wanted to try. It’s shot on Hi-Def video so it’ll age well. It’s not a crazy thing to do. Basically on today’s TVs it’s going to look like an old show. But when everyone has Hi-Def television, it’ll look OK.

DRE: Who else is starring on the show?

CK: Pamela Adlon plays my wife and Jim Norton is one of my friends on the show. Also there’s Michael Haggerty, Jerry Minor, Laura Kightlinger and Rick Shapiro plays my brother in law.

DRE: Are you directing any episodes?

CK: No, there’s no time for that shit. There’s a lot to do.

DRE: How did your last half hour HBO special come to you?

CK: For me it was part of the deal, to do a half hour special and to develop a pilot. So they both ended up working out. I really wanted to do the special because I had a lot of material built up.

DRE: Are you still doing cartoons with Robert Smigel?

CK: I haven’t done that in a long time.

DRE: Didn’t you co-write the Shazang TV Funhouse?

CK: Oh, that came out of a conversation I had with him a few years ago. We were riffing on an idea a few years ago when he had TV Funhouse on Comedy Central. Comedy Central paid to do a bunch of outlines in case they wanted to pick up the show. So I worked with Robert on those outlines over two weeks or so. I came up with some of those ideas during that two weeks, but he’s very generous with credit. I’ve emailed him a few ideas and he gives me credit like I wrote it with him.

DRE: Shazang was just brilliant.

CK: I thought that was pretty great.

DRE: Smigel told me that you came up the sketch that had Dana Carvey as Bill Clinton breast feeding puppies on The Dana Carvey Show.

CK: Yes, I did.

DRE: It killed the show.

CK: That was just the wrong show and wrong time slot so it wasn’t something that was ever going to work. We were doing all this crazy stuff in primetime so I don’t think it was a very good mix. I think when we originally sold the show they were going to air it later and bill it as bad guys doing the wrong thing type comedy show. But I think ABC got sold to Disney when we were in pre-production so a lot of things changed while we were there.

DRE: I read that you and Chris Rock are going to be adapting the Eric Rohmer film, Chloe in the Afternoon.

CK: Yeah, that’s a script that Chris and I wrote a couple years ago and I haven’t had too much to do with it. I guess they sold it to Fox Searchlight. That was about three weeks I spent in a room with Chris, I forgot about it and then I read it in the trades.

DRE: Whose idea was it?

CK: Chris saw Chloe in the Afternoon and really dug it. So we fucked around with it for about three weeks and he kept writing on it after that. He sends me copies and I make comments and we talk about it. But I’ve been immersed in the series for the last year so I haven’t thought about anything else.

DRE: What are you up to now?

CK: We shot 13 episodes so we’re editing them and putting them together. Also HBO ordered additional scripts. So those episodes aren’t bonafide yet, not until we air them, so we’re writing them now, then in the event that the show works on the air and they want more episodes they’ll have more scripts.

DRE: What did you think when Chris Rock hosted the Oscars and ripped on Pootie Tang?

CK: I didn’t care about that. It’s an appropriate remark because it is in the context of the Oscars. Also I made a movie and it got made fun of on the fucking Oscars, in front of the world. That wouldn’t bum me out. I would be the biggest retard if I were to sit there and have hurt feelings about that. If you ask Chris he will tell that is probably the best movie he’s been in. Everybody secretly loves Pootie Tang, people always come up to Chris and me and say, “I loved Pootie Tang.” It’s a dumb movie, but it works.

DRE: Have you made a movie since?

CK: I haven’t made a movie since then but I’ve done a shitload of other work. I’ve done a Comedy Central special, two pilots where one is a series now, I did Cedric the Entertainer Presents for one year, just to have something to do. But definitely the movie world is a very hard world.

DRE: Do you watch sketch comedy on TV?

CK: I haven’t really seen any. I don’t watch much television, Saturday Night Live is a complete blank to me, I haven’t seen anything good there, ever. Somebody gave me a video Ipod for Christmas and I downloaded some episodes of Wonder Showzen. Vernon Chatman, who put together Wonder Showzen, is an old friend of mine from The Chris Rock Show. That’s definitely got some great stuff.

Sketch comedy is really hard to do right and I feel like the only people who do it well are the ones who come together off screen and do it as a group. Then take that and put it on television, like The Kids in the Hall, Upright Citizen’s Brigade and even Saturday Night Live when they first started. Bob [Odenkirk] and David [Cross] did all their shit onstage for a long time before they put it on the television. Whenever people try to build a sketch show and build a new group, it just doesn’t work. Like Mad TV, I just can’t look at that.

DRE: Are you still doing standup?

CK: Oh yeah and I’ve been doing podcasts of it. That’s what I’m really into these days. I was just in San Francisco for two nights and I record all my shows now. Generally when I have bits I may not do again, stuff that caught fire one night, I throw it on the podcast. I just take my camera with me, I put it in the corner, I clip on the mic and I do the show. It’s crazy how easy it is.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Louis+CK/