Critic Alan Sepinwall moderated an Emmys panel with Louis C.K. and Pamela Adlon last week, in which they talked about why there were only eight episodes of Louie this season (it involves smoking pot and the winter) and the autobiographical nature of the street-dump scene. Say, speaking of things that come out of your butt… farts! Hilarious, right? Name something else that’s just as funny when you’re five months old as it is when you’re 10 as it is when you’re 40 as it is when you’re 75. Farts are well-worn comedic territory because they’re a great punchline, and “they make a little toot, and they come out of your asshole, and they smell bad.”
If this was the final episode of Louie (there’s been no word on Season 6 yet), it was a great one to go out on. It may not have been the funniest episode of the season — that probably goes to “A La Carte” — but it had a clear mission statement: A fart joke is just as funny as the morbidness of someone trying to take an upper-decker, then hitting his head on the bathroom floor and dying.
It was a nod toward the criticisms people have about Louie: It’s a comedy show without comedy, it think it’s better than [fill-in-the-black CBS sitcom], go back to Jew York City, etc. Those critiques are personified into Kenny, a masturbation-and-impression comedian who doesn’t think of stand-up as a miserable calling; it’s his job, and he loves it because he goes to work, makes a crack about some lady’s tits, then sends people home happy and horny. There’s no existential dread, the kind that Louie‘s been grappling with for 61 episodes. Why bother feeling sorry for yourself?
A fart joke a day keeps the therapist away.
What “The Road, Pt. 2,” and all of Louie for that matter, does so well is agree with both Louie and Kenny. Yes, Kenny’s a hack, but he’s not wrong about farts (a topic the show dedicated half an episode to in “Pregnant”); yes, Louie’s a sad snob, but he’s not wrong that comedy can be more than just farts. Louie, the show, had it both ways. It could have some kid sh*tting in the tub one week, and Louie apologizing to a comedian for being a prick the next. And death, always.
The final scene of the episode is set in Louie’s kitchen, where he shows one of his daughters the photo he took with two women while in Oklahoma City. Rather than admit he experienced something, anything, and actually had fun (and referenced a viral photo of Civil War C.K.), he tells Jane that the man in the photo is actually his great-great-great-great grandfather who got killed by a snake, but not the same snake that he murdered after it ate his wife.
The story was ridiculous and dark. The only thing missing was the snake pooping her out.
