I was on the road last week when Louis C.K. pulled out of hosting the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Dinner, but for a number of reasons, it strikes me as the right move, and not a surprising one. Much of the public speculation about his decision is linked to some off-color remarks he made about Sarah Palin, which I think we can all agree were both off-color and not exceptionally funny or insightful. But when I spoke to him at the Television Critics Association press tour in January, he actually suggested that it had been a mistake to accept from the start and that he was looking for a way to withdraw. He said:

I don’t know why I agreed to do that. I’m actually thinking of getting out if it. 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 was more fun to have her 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…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 that’s both true and a reason why, even though I think C.K. is a remarkable comedian, he wouldn’t have been particularly good at this kind of gig. That kind of curiosity and wonder are compelling and important, but they’re also entirely alien to the culture of Washington, and might be interpreted as an affront by people who take their worldviews and their sense of how to run a country very, very seriously, which is too bad. Stephen Colbert may have mocked President Bush’s sense of certainty, but I’m not sure he was calling the project of partisanship into question as a whole, which is part of why his performance was so effective and devastating. C.K. is a rarer, weirder, more open creature, and I wonder if the whole thing might have been more awkward for him than it would have been a calling to account for the people who sat through his performance.

I was looking through the acting nominations for the Comedy Awards, and it really struck me that in a lot of ways, 2011 was a richer year for women in comedy than it was for men.

In movies, Jason Bateman got a nod for Horrible Bosses, Steve Carell was nominated for Crazy, Stupid, Love, Jean Dujardin was tapped for The Artist, Zach Galifianakis for The Hangover Part II, and Owen Wilson for Midnight in Paris. None of these are particularly innovative roles, and all of them (except Dujardin, whose range I don’t really know) fall pretty squarely within these actors’ existing ranges: Bateman is a tense straight man, Carell is sympathetic and slightly clueless, Galifianakis is disconcerting and wild, and Wilson is winsome. There are a few things that I think were left off this list—I’ll defend The Trip until I run out of breath, Patton Oswalt was great and under-recognized for Young Adult, and I’m not really sure why 50/50, which was nominated elsewhere, didn’t score acting nods—but I can’t think of a performance by a man that’s not here that was a revelation. Ditto in TV, which was dominated by utterly predictable nods for Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, Ty Burrell in Modern Family, Steve Carell in The Office, and Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. I’m glad to see Louis C.K. in there—his performance in Louie was arguably my favorite thing on television in 2011. But it’s not like he has a lot of peers.

For women, on the other hand, the nominations are actually a lot of fun. I didn’t love Horrible Bosses, but seeing Jennifer Aniston get totally raunchy and ridiculous was a fun stretch for her. Ditto for Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher—depending on how she takes her career next, she could leave horrid romantic comedies behind and steer more in the direction of Charlize Theron in Young Adult, who really ought to be here. Melissa McCarthy was a miracle in Bridesmaids, and Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne, who had an utterly breakout performance in that film also could have easily been nominated. Television has its predictable notes—Tina Fey, for a deeply uninspired season of 30 Rock and Sofia Vergara for Modern Family. But you’ve got Zooey Deschanel in there for a debut performance in New Girl, and Maya Rudolph could easily be there for Up All Night, along with Laura Dern in Enlightened, Kat Dennings or Beth Behrs in 2 Broke Girls (that show’s massive flaws are not their fault), any of the women in Community‘s cast or Eliza Coupe or Elisha Cuthbert in Happy Endings.

And if Whitney or Are You There, Chelsea? had been less terrible, and we’d fulfilled all the potential of the lady comedy boom, this could have been an even more crowded field. I may not be equally addicted to every female comedy performance on the market these days. But it seems like there’s a lot of space available for new actresses to enter the field, and for actresses with existing track records to step out of their comfort zones. If those conditions persist, that’s a recipe for an embarrassment of riches.

The bridge is yours.

-Todd VanDerWerff on Glee. Even more than usual.

-Nuclear submarines are the new big pop culture trend.

-Ashley Tisdale and Louis C.K., because why not?

-Your visual cheat sheet to Hugo, which if you’re going to see one Oscar-nominated movie before this weekend, I recommend.

-Speaking of which, Oscar Etiquette:

This post contains spoilers through the February 16 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Okay, I’m not going to lie: if I were offered a real-life choice between Adam Scott and Louis C.K., both of whom I have seen in the flesh, it would not be an easy decision for me. So I sympathize with Leslie when Officer Dave Sanderson returns from San Diego intent on winning her back from boyfriend and campaign manager Ben Wyatt. Particularly because watching those two gentlemen square off for her affections in competing comedic cycles was easily the best part of an episode that was otherwise largely recapitulated Mouserat and Duke Silver jokes, and what Vulture has articulately dissected as the show’s Ann Perkins problem. Because the prospect of Ann allowing herself to be brow-beaten into dating Tom depresses me more than I want to contemplate, herewith let me present the official Alyssa Rosenberg Guide to Picking Between Ben and Dave:

Politics:

Pro Ben: He’ll manage your campaign, has good instincts for the attack, a handy grasp of fiscal policy, and the ability to assimilate into a community by eventually coming to love tiny horses.

Con Ben: He’s got that awful political legacy trailing behind him. And there’s the scandal thing, if Pawnee voters end up caring about that. Occasionally condescending.

Pro Dave: He will likely be able to hand out reelection endorsement after reelection endorsement to you after he becomes sheriff and you become member of the city council. Also, he can probably get you Bobby’s file for negative ads.

Con Dave: Unlikely to be able to keep you calm during a contentious focus group.

Manliness:

Pro Ben: He will punch people who call you a bitch. Will do sexual roleplay where he pretends to be various presidents.

Con Ben: Crying Batman.

Pro Dave: “I was thinking that I would cuff him and that I would have time to speak with you and you would decide to speak with me and then we’d come back and uncuff him together.” Uses feminism to try to win you back, if kind of clumsily. Ron Swanson would probably approve.

Con Dave: That tendency to abuse police power might not be so awesome in the long run. Plus, suggests that your ex is secretly super-effeminate, which are not the actions of a confident man.

Intellectual Style:

Ben: Twitchy indignation, be it over budgets, mini-horses, or science fiction and fantasy.

Dave: Folksy understatement: “We had a romantical involvement until I relocated to San Diego…which is southwest of here by a number of miles.”

Hair:

Ben: Hipster.

Dave: Ginger.

The bridge is yours.

-This is a pretty plausible explanation for why CBS does so well.

-Louis C.K. starts a movement.

-Jonny Lee Miller is Sherlock Holmes because why not?

-Chernobyl as horror movie.

-And the streak continues:

This makes me exceedingly happy: CBS just bought a recession-themed sitcom pilot from Louis C.K. and Spike Feresten. Not a lot of details yet on anything other than the fact that that the show will apparently be about “young people who are trying to achieve their creative dreams.” But I’d follow C.K. into a burning building at this point if he promised me that content was inside it and I’d get to consume it before I succumbed to smoke inhalation.

I also think this is an interesting experiment in whether C.K.’s deeply compelling brand of honesty and moral comedy can find a mass audience, and whether he can do it without the explicitness that’s made Louie such a wonderful discussion of sex and gender from a man’s perspective. I hope the former will be true — I’d love to see a show that combines the sometimes-painful optimism of something like Parks and Recreation with the class consciousness of Raising Hope and the lived-in friendships of Happy Endings do well. On the second, while C.K. may (outside of race) get the most attention for his routines about sex and sexual humiliation, his up-front approach to things like buying a house, or having his daughters prefer their mother to him, or professional failure would translate extremely well to the networks without requiring him to compromise the material at all.

I’d also really like a show from him (or really, from anyone) to continue the trend that Southland started of having the characters talk like real people of those backgrounds and in those circumstances would, but bleeping them out. We’ve seen a bit of this on Parks and Recreation, where the generally clean-spoken characters occasionally lapse into real-world profanity, and on other shows, but I think it would be decent practice to do a bit more of it. Television doesn’t just capture characters in the least-stressful moments of their lives — quite the reverse. I can understand why we’ve got some limitations on speaking words aloud in prime time (even though I think its the job of parents to keep their kids away from content they find generally objectionable), but I think it would make sense to find a compromise that keeps the kiddies’ ears clean while trusting adults to know what’s really being said.

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.

Business Insider has pretty much the best headline announcing this news: “Some People Who Don’t Know Louis CK’s Material Very Well Just Booked Him for the Congressional Correspondents Dinner.” I like C.K. in part because his jokes are psychological, and often oriented towards making people recognize their common experiences and values. But it’s true that they aren’t the kind of zippy political one-liners that someone like Stephen Colbert can toss off all day. So here are five things that C.K. should do when he comes to Washington:

1. Get at the audience’s failure to ask the important questions of the day, like whether Donald Rumsfeld is a lizard from outer space who eats human flesh:

2. Washington is ridiculously full of powerful white people. Remind them how awesome their lives are — and that they aren’t necessarily responsible for that awesomeness:

3. Point out a fundamental an uncomfortable truth: no matter how tough reporters are, and no matter what their political leanings are, people get star-struck by proximity to the president (starts at 3:15):

4. If you take one policy position, go hard on evolution and its deniers. Please:

5. Remember: your Sarah Palin jokes are not your funniest (or best) work of the past couple of years:

At Netroots New York this weekend, I went to an interesting workshop by John Hlinko, the man behind Left Action (and, interestingly, the write-in campaign to get former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty reelected after he lost the Democratic primary) and Julianna Forlano, the Brooklyn College media professor and voice behind the Ironic News Report. They were discussing how to use comedy to recruit people for activist projects, which is, of course, different from comedy for comedy’s sake. But the presentation raised some interesting questions for me about how best to make arguments through comedy — and whether, as progressives, it makes more sense for us to be rallying the troops internally, or to be working on converting the unconvinced.

“What makes people laugh,” Julianna said, is “surprise and a feeling of superiority…this is one that can be used for good or evil. You can use it to create a feeling of solidarity with your people, or you can do that thing I mentioned, where Mexicans love gardening. What we want to do is turn our focus on those people who are in power.” Which I think is true, to a certain extent. But there’s always the danger that in cutting people down to size, you end up confirming your (and your audience’s) own biases in a way that disarms your ability to fight hypocrisy and damaging ideas. Take the idea that Republicans are stupid. John used, as an example, a campaign he used to attract followers to LeftAction, getting people to register Facebook likes for the concept: “Can this horse’s ass get more fans than Mitch McConnell?” “It was clearly tapping into the kind of community,” he told us. “It pre-sold them on the concept. And then I said if you like an edgy, creative approach to left activism, like LeftAction.”

I get the impulse, especially if you’re feeling beaten up, to take refuge in the idea that your opponents are stupid. But that’s not actually an argument that’s going to dislodge people who agree with the arguments you’re not actually addressing, a project towards which I am more temperamentally inclined. By contrast, there’s something like Hustler’s Jerry Falwell parody, which was both funny because it was obviously not true, and because it provoked him into a response that made Larry Flynt’s point for him: that Falwell was thin-skinned, brittle, and humorless. The parody ad worked precisely because Hustler was coming into it from a position of confidence, rather than insecurity. He didn’t scare them enough for Flynt and company to have to reassure themselves that they were better than Falwell was—in fact, the ad copy is written completely straight, and sets Falwell up as a figure of authority within the context of the joke. “The greater the prestige of the target, the greater desire of people to see them equalized,” Julianna said. “My theory is we all know this is an illusion…Some of us on the left have to get over saying we love everyone and go on the attack.” The question is, what’s the best way to expose that artificiality? Dismantling illusions takes more work than just stating that they’re mirages, but it’s probably more effective in the long term.

I brought this up in the session, and John and Julianna and I talked about it afterward, but I also think it’s important to remember that comedy can be an incredibly valuable tool for reframing debates. The funniest bit of Louis C.K.’s environmentalist riff on his current tour and in his special isn’t necessarily the bit about people who think the natural world is there for them to exploit. It’s him as an aggrieved, and slightly naive, God, asking, “What the fuck did you do to my duck? It had a green head and it was so awesome and you fucking killed it!” When our debates become about who is smarter, or cooler, we’re losing focus. Sometimes the most important thing about environmentalism is the wonder of the duck.

The bridge is yours.

-Louis C.K.: web innovator and skeptic.

-Ninja engagement photos. Zombies are so earlier this year.

-Apparently we get five more Daniel Craig-as-Bond movies.

-Restoring the credits of blacklisted screenwriters.

-More Azelia Banks:

LIQUORICE by Azealia Banks