Last September, while drinking heavily on a long flight with wi-fi, Louis C.K. unleashed a stream of vile, crude and hilarious invective targeted at Greatest American Hero Sarah Palin. It was wonderful.
A few days later he went on the Opie and Anthony radio show and said even more vile, crude and hilarious things about the folksy Alaskan garden hose (You can hear the entire interview here and here).
A few days later, as luck would have it, Louis C.K. was guest on Leno’s Tonight Show, and who do you think was also a guest that night? The face-morphing Bristol Palin, of course!
Even better, Leno, the evil prick that he is, asked the two to dance together. How awkward was that? Well, take a look at those aforementioned vile, crude and hilarious things Louis C.K. said about Bristol’s mother on Twitter…
So fast forward to today and GQ is out with a Louis C.K. interview about the whole Palin saga in which he expresses regret for saying the things that he said about her.
A couple of nights later, when he appeared on “The Tonight Show,” C.K. was seated next to Bristol Palin, and near the end of the show she invited him to dance with her and her then partner from “Dancing with the Stars.” “I had no idea until I arrived that her fucking daughter was on the show,” he told me over breakfast. “She seemed so nervous to me, and after her segment I told her, ‘You did a good job. That’s not easy.’ And she said, ‘Thank you.’ And then she invited me to dance. And I knew I was paying some kind of penance for what I’d done. I’m standing there—me, Bristol Palin, Jay Leno, and the “Dancing with the Stars” dude”—his face took on the Platonic expression of unhappiness—”and I’m like, This is totally karma. Pretty direct karma.”
I asked if he regretted saying that stuff about a woman, even if it was Sarah Palin. “God, what a mess. I really shouldn’t have done that. I regret it a lot. I wish I hadn’t done that.”
But then, hilariously, later in the interview, he reversed course and began dropping bombs on the moose chili goddess again, because it’s virtually impossible not to make fun of Sarah Palin.
But then the strength of her awfulness proved too powerful for him. “You know what it is? Honestly, I think she’s a shit mother, I really do. I’m saying that as a parent. I think she’s a horrible parent. To parade around with that Down-syndrome baby, to hold him up in front of the fucking Republican National Convention, it’s just gross. I don’t mean the kid’s gross, it’s just a gross thing to do. It’s exploitative … And then he added: “All that other shit, though, saying Palin had a Chinese family in her vagina and whatever, I don’t regret that. It’s comedy. I have said many indefensible things onstage. It’s fucking comedy. Plus, I do believe if she got elected, she’d really Hitler up the place.”