America’s shock radio hosts are not particularly know for their respect for and decent treatment of women. It’s hard to think of a week in American politics where that tendency has been more on display. When Rush Limbaugh gets so disgusting in his smearing of a monogamous woman who’s testifying in support of the administration’s birth control policy that President Obama is moved to intervene, it’s a clear sign—as if we needed yet another one—that we’re harboring something disturbing in our public discourse. So there’s something very odd about the pop culture effort in recent years to rehabilitate shock jocks—or at least to persuade what are clearly America’s ridiculous uptight feminists to get over themselves.

First, there was The Ugly Truth. In that movie, Katherine Heigel is a television producer who’s forced to work with a gross, lowest-common denominator shock jock played by Gerard Butler. He’s the kind of guy who we’re supposed to think is clever because he boosts ratings with jello wrestling, and who, when he spends a dinner torturing Heigel’s character with a pair of vibrating panties (literally), it’s supposed to be hilarious rather than at minimum sexual harassment. But instead of interpreting him as a crass creep, the whole point of The Ugly Truth is that he’s actually a nice guy, who is good to his nephew, brings his coworkers closer together, and is actually what Heigel’s uptight, narrow-minded control freak needs in her life, sexually and otherwise. The reckoning isn’t really about the gap between his public behavior and his private self—it’s Heigel’s character being forced to realize he’s right about everything, and to stop giving him trouble about behavior that is ugly but commercially successful.

Now, we’re going to be forced to go through this all over again in a show that’s not just meant to sell us on the idea that shock jocks are cool but that will also be about trying to get us to like Dane Cook. NBC, in what seems to be proof that the network that gave us Community can go lowest-common-denominator with the worst of them, is going to have Cook play a shock jock who’s paired with a feminist radio host. His character is supposed to be a “disheveled, unshaven, hung-over and purposely detached magnetic grouch who doesn’t like that his co-host is a woman.” The formula’s so obvious it’s painful: Cook will get over his objection to his co-host being a woman because they’ll evolve into a will-they-or-won’t-they pairing. But it’l be the co-host who starts making compromises on her feminism on discovering that Cook’s character has some sort of painful past. In other words, utter nonsense that requires the man involved to accept approximately zero responsibility for being sexist and awful.

But in real life, slut-shaming women in an effort to terrorize them out of speaking publicly, sexually harassing them on the airwaves, and treating them like objects aren’t excusable because your’e a wounded man-child. They’re not acts that have no impact in the world and can be made up for with dinner, or good sex. And feminists of both genders and women in general aren’t the people in this dynamic whose attitudes need to change.

This post contains spoilers for the two episodes of Louie that aired on Aug. 11.

I should note that I tend to hold jokes made by liberals about evangelical Christians to a higher standard. If you’re going to venture into an arena of humor where it’s easy to take low roads and cheap shots and still be rewarded fairly handsomely for it by your audience. So it’s evidence of Louis C.K.’s genius that he took a scenario where he could have relentlessly mocked a character who enters the episode declaring that masturbation’s as terrible as Hurricane Katrina or Rwanda because “those events, while certainly serious, affected people in only one region or area,” and made the entire episode an extended joke on himself.

“You don’t know the darkness that you live in,” the anti-masturbation advocate tells Louis. “Oh, I know the darkness,” he says, and it goes from there. What follows is possibly the most hilarious and depressing masturbation fantasy ever put to film, and that definitely includes anything in the first American Pie movie, which for all that it’s become kind of ridiculous is actually great that first time out. In trying to get himself off to a memory of a hot girl in an elevator, only to find himself imagining an absurd scenario involving a shopping bag full of penises, and another occupant in the elevator who ends up telling him that “American women are very complicated.”
Read more

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 4 episode of Louie.

I think Marc Hirsch is overstating the case slightly in this otherwise excellent piece on Louie to say that the character “exists outside of continuity,” because I do think events in the series resonate from one episode to the next even if they’re not followed up on directly. But I think he is absolutely correct that “C. K. is, in many ways, the preeminent short-story writer currently working in the television medium.” So there’s something fitting about the fact that this week’s episode is commentary on Louie’s diversion from the traditional sitcom format, and a short story that O. Henry might have written if he had kids and they wanted Lady Gaga tickets.

It was also a nicely feminist episode. Louis C.K. often goes to places that I’m uncomfortable with when women are on screen, but I’m generally uncomfortable, as I was in the episode where he ends up spanking a crying PTA parent, because of the things that are happening are true, not because they’re sexist. So there was something wonderful about seeing C.K. on a sitcom set, complete with a laugh track, treating the actress playing his wife badly, and unable to go through with a scene where he lies to her, admits it, and gets told “I love you.” “Why would you say that? I just did a really dick thing. Why would you say ‘I love you’?” he asks her, genuinely bewildered. And he just can’t get back into the groove and pull the sitcom, and by extension, a more stable life for his own real family, together. “This woman is trying to raise two kids and her husband keeps shitting all over her, chipping away at her furniture with his bad attitude. Are you folks seriously buying this shit?” he tells the director. “We’re making all the same mistakes, the wife that’s too hot for the dude, and the friend who I would never hang out with.”

This is the kind of thing that makes Louis C.K. such a favorite for those of us who think about comedy a lot, and have to watch the same thing over and over, and why he can get Dane Cook on camera and directly address the vote-stealing controversy between them—his work both implicitly and explicitly acts as a critique and as a remedy to our current state of comedy.

The reason that Louis and Cook end up in the same room is that, having disappointed her years ago by failing to pull off the sitcom, apologizing to infant her that “Sorry, baby, your dad is a comedian. It’s your tough luck. Okay. Let’s put you to sleep,” he’s now trying to make it up to her. Confident he’s nailed the perfect birthday present for her, Louis jokes around with her at a diner, telling her an envelope is “for the little old lady who lives in your nose” when she asks if the present is for her. But it turns out the joke is on him — his daughter’s moved on to Lady Gaga, a move that has Louis decidedly dismayed. “I want you to grow up to like yourself and have a job and be strong and think about who you are,” he tells her. “I don’t want you to think it’s all about your looks, and glamor, and stuff.” But she’s a good little fourth wave feminist, and asks him “Can’t I grow up like that and still like Lady Gaga?” Being a comedian may not make you an ideal parent, but as Louis proves time and time again on his show, it’s possible to make up for that.