Because I’ve written so much about the unifying approach to politics Louis CK has been taking on Louie this year, I made sure to ask him about it when I got the chance yesterday. His answer was in striking context to the very, very funny pontificating by Russell Brand that followed, sample lines of which included, “I think we are passing the time, as human beings, where we look to these people to lead us”; the observation that Mitt Romney sees other billionaires as “Dickensian street urchins, eating gruel with fingerless gloves”; the declarations that “I like metaphorical systems for understanding mortality. Death is confusion; that “Until there is a fundamental spiritual revolution, I don’t care what color, red or blue or black or white, the pigment on their skin or the color on their flags”; and the insistence “the only legitimate distinction in global politics and society is rich or poor.”

CK said the driving force in his political humor was curiosity rather than expertise:

I don’t have any political opinions, I just am very curious. And it’s very interesting to listen to what people say. What’s the best way to run a country and the world? Those are really profound questions. I don’t have the confidence to say that I know one way or another. Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I’m very suspicious. It doesn’t make sense to me that you’d have the same solution to every issue. I just like listening. I try to take people who are way far away from what I think or understand and put a representative of them on my show. I like to try to learn form them. When we did the show with the Christian anti-masturbating lady, it would have been easy to have a stupid Christian anti-masturbating lady…it was more fun to have her be really eloquent and see if I could learn from someone who never masturbates. There really is a very blissful, beautiful idea behind that. I f I could stop, I would be very happy. When I went to Afghanistan with the USO, I’m a pacifist, and I’m really against any violence, and I think there’s zero reason to ever do it. I learned so much from being around those folks, and I feel like I was enriched by it…This is what I saw, here, you guys can make your own opinions. I think it’s better to illuminate shit and learn about it than to opinionate about it…I’m a little dumb. I sleep too much, and I did a lot of drugs when I was a kid. I can’t handle the responsibility of having a political opinion.

I think, as was often the case, that CK is being a bit self-deprecating here. He obviously has some politicized opinions, even if they’re not partisan ones, or specific policy proposals he backs in his humor. This is, after all, a guy who told me after the session that he tries never to connect his love for his daughters to their physical appearance so they won’t think they’re only loved for their looks, which is kind of remarkable and wonderful. And this might be a point in and of itself—that the best way to get us past the worst of our partisan gridlock is not to hold up bipartisanship as a fetish, but to encourage genuine curiosity and idiosyncrasy in our political thinking again.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

“Bitcoin for Dummies” was one of those episodes of The Good Wife that revolves around everyone manipulating everyone else. Unfortunately, since Will is facing the very real prospect of jail time and Eli isn’t in the episode at all, the machinations are grim, without the undertone of playfulness this show often gives even cases involving serious issues. To make up for that, though, we get double Kalinda, as she plays a central role in both the case of the week and in Will’s legal woes.

A lawyer named Dylan Stack, who has Treasury agents literally following him around, comes to Lockhart/Gardner because of Alicia’s past dealings with Treasury. (This show is one of the best around at remembering to let previous cases affect new ones.) The Treasury department is after Stack’s client for supposedly creating a new online currency called bitcoin, and they’re after Stack because he won’t tell them his client’s identity. At first, Will is understandably reluctant to take on a possibly quixotic and high-profile case against the government in the middle of his own tussle with the State’s Attorney, but the representative of the brave new world of virtual money has arrived with piles of cash, and we know that Lockhart/Gardner needs cash. Judge Sobel quickly rules that Stack doesn’t have to give up his client’s identity, but since we’re still in the first half of the episode, that can’t possibly end things, and it doesn’t: Gordon Higgs, the same Treasury lawyer Alicia dealt with a few episodes ago, promptly arrests Stack for being the creator of bitcoin himself.

Perhaps characteristically, Will wants to go on the offense where Alicia and Diane are inclined to defense. They try to argue that bitcoin isn’t a currency at all, so it doesn’t matter whether Stack created it. But after some back and forth, including a fun cameo by CNBC’s Jim Cramer as an expert witness, Sobel rules that bitcoin is a currency, basically because it’s transferable and you can buy things with it on Amazon. I wasn’t entirely convinced – Cramer made some good points about bitcoin not having many of the characteristics of currency, including a central regulating bank, and another witness’s comparison of bitcoin to frequent flier miles seemed apt – but at least this outcome meant we got to spend the rest of the episode watching Kalinda run around a cryptography conference in pursuit of the real inventor of bitcoin.

Kalinda eventually figures out that bitcoin is three people, not one: Stack and his two partners all accuse each other in hopes of leading both Kalinda and the Treasury agents in circles. The most interesting element of this is that one of the partners is a beautiful young blond woman, and Kalinda astutely points out that the woman could use her gender and looks to deflect suspicion: Everyone assumes that the inventor of a revolutionary tech product must be male, and it’s satisfying to see a woman turn this discrimination on its head and use it to her advantage. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter that Kalinda is being manipulated, because she doesn’t need to have the true answer as long as she can play Higgs the way she wants, and no one on this show – with the possible exception of Eli – can manipulate like Kalinda. She sets up (and “accidentally” records) a meeting with Higgs at which she promises to unmask the real inventor of bitcoin, and this proof that Higgs doesn’t really believe that Stack is the inventor leads the judge to dismiss the case. At their last meeting, Alicia tells Stack that she bought one bitcoin, but that it didn’t feel real. Stack responds with unexpected words of wisdom that could be the tagline for the whole show: “Real’s gonna change. Just watch.”
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When I wrote about Stephen Colbert a couple of weeks ago, I said that the thing I admired most about him was his willingness to disrupt the system, whether he’s nuking the vibe at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner or pushing the limits of what you can do with a Super PAC. All of which makes me wonder how far he’ll be willing and able to go with his run for president, if he actually gets in the game.

It’s one thing to buy ad time and cut spots to run in the slots you’ve bought. That’s a relatively easy task for people whose jobs involve making short, funny segments and airing them on television: the only difference is that you’re paying for the air time rather than being paid to fill it up. And even though I’m generally less fond of him, I think Jon Stewart, who has control of Colbert’s Super PAC now, and his staff will be able to do that just fine. People tolerate a lot of weirdness on most of their airwaves anyway.

But it’s a lot harder to convince people that you should be allowed to participate in the mechanisms of the presidential contest. South Carolina, Colbert’s home state, doesn’t actually allow write-in campaigns for primaries, and because he didn’t meet the registration deadline, there won’t be a way for him to compete in the race there. Presidential debates, no matter how silly they can become, tend to be considered a different kind of space. We can argue over whether Buddy Roemer or Colbert is a less serious candidate, but if Roemer has been excluded from the Republican debates, it’s hard to imagine they’d allot a podium to Colbert.

So Colbert’s going to have to find another way in if he’s truly to be an amusingly disruptive force here, and I’m not entirely sure what it’ll be. At least with the Super PAC, there was a very specific policy target to his clowning. Taking on a whole system or a means of thinking is a much harder task, especially when the barriers to entry are so high.