A quick review of tonight’s “Louie” coming up just as soon as I ask about Obama…
Of the season 2 episodes I’ve seen so far, I think “Moving” was my favorite, because it manages to squeeze so many of the things I love about “Louie” into a single story.
The plot itself – in which Louie tries to find a new apartment because his daughters still think of the current one as the place where he and his ex lived – is fairly simple. But it’s larded with both the usual amounts of Louis C.K.’s self-loathing (here he’s represented as a man who somehow only has $7,000 in his bank account) and his view of New York City as simultaneously a surreal hellpit (exemplified by the elderly immigrant’s weird apartment) and a fantasyland (the luxurious townhouse once occupied by Lenny Bruce). Very basic stuff – Louie wants to find a new place to live, can’t find a place he both likes and can afford, and eventually resorts to just repainting the old place with the girls – but sharp and sweet and silly in that very “Louie” way.
And by keeping things simple, we were able to check in on some of the show’s recurring characters, as Todd Barry made a case for why he should have been included in “The Aristocrats,” while Pamela Adlon was her usual no-bullshit self with Louie. (Though if she had seen the homeless man get abducted and replaced, she might have been a bit more sympathetic to Louie’s desire to flee.)
“Moving” also featured two marvelous stand-up bits. I’m especially curious about the first one, where his air travel routine seems to go awry when he gets hung up on having identified one of the characters as a Chasidic Jew. I know much of the stand-up material is taken from C.K.’s recent act, which I haven’t seen, and I wonder if it’s designed like that – that the story of the joke is actually a ruse so he can play with everyone’s hang-ups about ethnicity, sexuality, etc. – or if C.K. just inadvertently went down a weird road as he was taping the bit for the show, and liked the way it played out enough to keep it in. Either way, very funny, and the bit about his hatred of a monarchy system was even better.
What did everybody else think?