Gig review by Steve Bennett

The last time Louis CK tried to play the UK in 2019, his gigs got pulled almost as soon as they were announced, so intense was the backlash to the idea that a comic who admitted sexual misconduct was being given a platform.

No such protests now, though it still feels a little grubby giving him custom. Comedy is the hardest form of performance in which to separate the art from the artist, given how raw and personal stand-up is at its best. Let’s face it, if you were introduced to an accountant who you knew masturbated in front of his colleagues, you’d give him a wide berth. And probably not shake his hand. 

However, CK looks like he’s wearing his notoriety as a badge of honour, announcing himself offstage as ‘the disgraced, disgusting Louis CK’, like an edgy bad boy.

But actually, he doesn’t make any direct reference to his scandal, even when its shadow looms large over material. Some lines that might otherwise be innocuous now have an unspoken context, such as when he mulls whether he’d have had the moral backbone to be on the right side of history had he lived in the past. He’s talking about slavery, but his hopes that he has the right ethical compass seem hard to stand up.

Putting his tarnished image aside, as much as you can, his self-inflicted years as a pariah seem to have dented his mojo. He’s still a fine technician, but no longer does his material shine a light on the lot of the schlubby bloke muddling through life with an uncommonly bleak undertow. Instead, much of his set at Wembley’s Ovo Arena seems like a cynical race to the bottom – a succession of bad-taste ideas raised solely for their shock value, not because he can engineer a comically twisted logic to justify them. 

He considers eating babies, describes the ‘fart porn’ videos he’s seen online, talks about diarrhoea, abortion, paedophilia, mimes kicking a child to death… Then there’s the ‘comedy’ Japanese accent, or the bit where he says racist things before rescuing them with the second half of the interrupted sentence. 

Despite all this, some routines are provocative in the right way, rather than just pushing the buttons of offensiveness, such as the murky ethics of keeping his 98-year-old father alive. Even his take on dating younger women has a twist that’s pretty good, once you stop rolling your eyes at the inevitability of the situation (again, he chooses to have a blind spot for his own behaviour, which is a flaw for a once-confessional comedian). And in a rare venture away from sick comedy, he offers an amusing retelling of a lesser-known Bible story that shows Jesus to be a spoilt brat.

But these oases are not enough to overcome the feeling that CK has lost his lustre, and not just reputationally. After a sold-out gig at the 4,000-capacity Hammersmith Apollo, there are plenty of seats left at Wembley, even with the upper layers curtained off. 

The encore has him reading sub-par new material from his notebook, which seems an insult to people who have paid more than £50 to see him, and cements the image of a comedian struggling to stay sharp and relevant, rather than the triumphant return of an exiled king of comedy.

Review date: 5 Oct 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Ovo Arena Wembley