‘Louie’ – ‘Pregnant’: Who are the people in your neighborhood?

I gave my overall thoughts on the start of “Louie” season 2 in a review I posted earlier this week. In future weeks, I imagine I’m going to have a lot more to say about specific episodes, but I’ll keep my season premiere thoughts brief, coming up just as soon as we sit and play the card game where nobody loses…

First things first: “Pregnant” is a very simple, fairly serious episode – albeit one that’s all a long wind-up to a very gross, funny, juvenile fart joke. Louie frets a bit about handling both his girls, his pregnant sister Gretchen (played by Rusty Schwimmer) comes for a visit and has a heartfelt talk with Louie about being parents, and then she has a medical scare and Louie learns the value of knowing your neighbors. Not complicated, but very effective, and I liked how Louie was able to juggle the gross-out humor of the fart gag back to back with the very sincere scene where the gay neighbor explains the moral of the story to him.

Second, I continue to love C.K.’s choices as a director/editor, particularly the use of jump cuts and those thunder sound effects to convey just how nightmarish the scenario was for Louie.

And third, I thought it was kind of funny that the episode ends with a bit of stand-up about how hard it is to make a new adult friend, which was the basis of a “Seinfeld” episode (complete with its own stand-up routine on the subject), for two reasons: 1)On the HBO “Talking Funny” special, Jerry Seinfeld did one of C.K.’s jokes, and C.K. remarked on how different it sounded coming out of Seinfeld’s mouth, and this was the reverse of that; and 2)The lead gay neighbor was played by Yul Vazquez, who appeared a few times on “Seinfeld” as one of the gay street toughts who steals the armoire from Kramer, and later beats him up for not wearing an AIDS ribbon.

What did everybody else think?

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