The same adept calculation saturates the statement that the comedian put out on Friday, a day after the allegations against him were made public. In his “apology” he mentions his anatomy multiple times, but the words “I’m sorry” not once. On the surface, he convincingly telegraphs contrition and a deep disgust at his own weaknesses, but disarming self-flagellation has always been his art. The careful message is “I, one man, made one mistake,” not “I, among many others, preyed upon vulnerable women in my industry, on purpose, because I am both a defender and a beneficiary of an entrenched system of oppression.” It’s easier to get your old job back if the power structure that gave it to you in the first place stays intact.
I am tired of calculation. If we’re having a reckoning, let’s have a full reckoning.
This week, the comedian Marc Maron, a friend and contemporary of Louis C.K., devoted his podcast’s opening monologue to the comedian’s transgressions and the gendered power dynamics in comedy. He acknowledged that comedy is a boys’ club and that he used to think female comics just needed to be funny and to “fight it out,” without realizing what else they had to deal with, specifically: “They have to deal with all of us.”
It’s among the most honest, cathartic admissions we’ve heard from comedy’s old guard, and I appreciate it. But I’m baffled by Maron’s apparent surprise at the structural inequality within his industry. A great many people have been pointing out women’s disadvantages in comedy for a very long time. Those people are called women. In return, we’ve been abused, discredited, blacklisted, turned into punch lines and driven out of the industry.
In 2012, Louis C.K. appeared on “The Daily Show” and said that “comedians and feminists are natural enemies” because “feminists can’t take a joke.” Jon Stewart nodded vigorously and agreed. Today, Stewart is being fawned over for acknowledging, in response to Louis C.K.’s fall, that “comedy on its best day is not a great environment for women.” Ten years from now, a female comedian friend texted me, a man will win awards for his documentary about all this.
If you believe us now only because your peers are facing professional ruin, that deserves its own reckoning. I’ll wait.
One of comedy’s defining pathologies, alongside literal pathologies like narcissism and self-loathing, is its swaggering certainty that it is part of the political vanguard, while upholding one of the most rigidly patriarchal hierarchies of any art form. Straight male comedians, bookers and club owners have always been the gatekeepers of upward mobility in stand-up, an industry where “women aren’t funny” was considered conventional wisdom until just a few years ago.
The solution isn’t more solemn acknowledgments from powerful male comedians. We have those. The solution is putting people in positions of power who are not male, not straight, not cisgender, not white. This is not taking something away unfairly — it is restoring opportunities that have been historically withheld. And if we address the power imbalance in comedy, in this art that shapes how people think, what jokes they repeat to their families, who they believe deserves to hold a microphone and talk out loud, other imbalances might follow.
There’s an old Louis C.K. joke that starts: “Divorce is always good news. I know that sounds weird, but it’s true, because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce.”
I know it’s hard, but this is the best thing that has happened to comedy in a long time.
