My favorite bit of Louis C.K.’s stint hosting Saturday Night Live was, I think not very surprisingly, the sketch where he recreated his FX show as if it were Abraham Lincoln living through awkward sex, stand-up comedy, and race relations in contemporary New York:

But I thought there were two particularly astute things about it, both of which are reasonable critiques of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, about which much more to come later in the week. The opening of the sketch gets at something Lincoln only deals with glancingly: Lincoln’s distance from the people he was freeing–the halting confession “I just don’t have any black friends.”
–and the question of what would happen both to freemen themselves and to the national economy after the passage of the 13th Amendment. “You’re all emancipated. It’s good, right?” Lincoln asks a freeman at a coffee bar in the first scene, trolling for complements. Now of course, slavery was absolutely terrible, but the failures of Reconstruction and the rise of the sharecropping system and other elements of economic apartheid continue to resonate today. Emancipation and the amendment were the beginning of a process that’s still ongoing to help people who were tools of the American economy become full participants in its labors and rewards, and it’s sly to work that in there.

In keeping with the sketch’s resonance for contemporary politics, C.K.’s summary of Lincoln’s dealings with slaveowners could apply to almost any political debate in which reason has fled the stage. “They’re like ‘Oh, but I like owning people,’” Lincoln/Louis explains in a monologue. “Oh, yeah , no, no, I get it. I totally get that. You gotta act like you’re kind of cool with it. ‘If I could own a couple of dudes, I’d love to own a couple of dudes.’…You have to act like this is a 50-50 issue. ‘You know, I just kinda think that owning a person is not cool, you stupid dick.’” I understand the need to compromise in the legislative process, to massage egoes and to make people feel respected. But it’s worth considering what we can do before things get to that point to knock some ideas out of the range of positions that deserve a fair hearing and emotional credence.

When Husbands, the online sitcom about a professional baseball player and a TV star who get married in a drunken weekend in Vegas and decide to stay together in support of marriage equality and because they think they might actually be in love, premiered last year, I wrote that “setting yourself up as a model minority may be an important way to argue for legal rights, real equality means the right to make mistakes and bad decisions—and to work your way out of them.” While that’s true of the show’s main characters Brady (Sean Hemeon) and Cheeks (Brad Bell, also the Husbands co-creator, writer, and executive producer with TV veteran Jane Espenson), when it comes to experimenting to discover the future, it’s also true of Husbands itself, one of the pioneering high-quality ongoing shows to live online rather than on a broadcast network.

What’s exciting about about Husbands, though, is how quickly the show has grown in scope and emotional ambition from its first season to its second, which premieres on August 15. A year’s acquaintance has richened the on-screen chemistry and affection between Hemeon and Bell, and Husbands has grown in confidence both in terms of the ideas it’s exploring and the team behind the show’s sense of the skills they’re developing by working on it. And the show is becoming an important example of how television distributed online fits into a larger pop-culture ecosystem, not simply as an alternative means of distribution for content networks are too timid to make, but as a rich idea lab that could breed a new generation of pop culture tropes and show-runners.

For a sense of that, I have an exclusive first look at the behind-the-scenes material the Husbands crew shot to accompany the second season, which goes inside the table reads and Bell and Espenson’s writing sessions, and also provides some perspective on how large the team involved in the show is:

And it is large: the $60,001 the Husbands team raised through their Kickstarter campaign helped pay the more than 40 people who worked on the second season of the show, let the production move from its cramped initial setting to a rented house that gives the scenes and actors room to breathe, and helped upgrade the cameras from commercial hand-held DSLRs to Steadicam rigs with Scarlet cameras that improved the quality of the images. “It looks like big TV,” Espenson joked when I visited the set in May. “It’s the new big TV,” Bell said, and it’s true. Husbands is an illustration of the narrowing gap between online sitcoms and their broadcast siblings.

The set and the crew aren’t the only way Husbands is bigger in its second season. The show has a large roster of major guest stars, most notably Joss Whedon as Brady’s clueless agent Wes. He’s the kind of man who declares “You know I’d gay-march on hepatatis-infected glass to change things,” even as he tries to get Brady to tone down Cheeks, explaining that “acceptable gays are overweight, over forty, overly professional with their lovers in public,” the show’s painfully accurate swipe at chemistry-free couples like Cam and Mitch on Modern Family. And in a sequence that will make fanboy hearts everywhere go pitter-patter even as it makes a point, Dichen Lachman and Tricia Helfer appear in a brutal parody of straight-guy fantasy about pillow-fighting college girls experimenting with lesbianism.
Read more

Television executives can get skittish about the strangest things, as I wrote earlier this summer about the Maxi pads, sex on kitchen tables, and the Lord’s name taken in vain that freaked out NBC suits during the Must See TV era. And one of the most striking differences between cable and network shows this last week has been the way people making programming for mediums talk about the role of standards and practices in their work.

“I think the only note we’ve gotten so far that makes it more of a network show than a cable show came from Standards this morning,” said Josh Berman, creator of NBC’s Mob Doctor, which stars Jordana Spiro as a young female surgeon who works for the Chicago mob when she isn’t pulling rotations. “We got a note that said ‘When you show the character’s urine, make sure it’s not too yellow, because too yellow violate network standards.’ So other than that, we don’t really differentiate between [making a show for cable and making a show for network.]” It turns out Standards okayed paler yellow urine in the scene. But it’s revealing that standards and practices at NBC thought something this minor was worth its creators time and attention. A show may not lose its artistic integrity through these tiny cuts, but it speaks to a profoundly conservative approach to standards. It’s hard to defend a large vision or a new approach when you’re freaked out by the color of a liquid standing in for urine in a test tube that’s momentarily on screen.

By contrast, Louis C.K. said that his interactions with Darlene Tipton, the vice president for standards and practices at FX and Fox Cable Networks, had been oriented towards a larger goal. “She said that her goal is to keep my show free and that she has a better sense of where the lines are,” he told the reporters at the Television Critics Association press tour. “Her department knows where the phone calls come from and…what fuses you’re more likely to break and where they are. So she keeps me within there. Because if I step too far over and I piss a group off really terribly, then I’m going to get curtailed beyond, you know, lower than I am now, if that makes any sense…So I always look to me, it’s a service to me, the standards.”

And that’s how standards and practices should work: serving the audience by serving the creative interests of creators, writers, and actors. It’s on the audience and critics to provide incentives, in the form of viewership, acclaim, and awards, for content that’s more diverse, or less harmfully sexist, or crude and dumb about gay people, or religious people, or any other kind of people. But standards and practices should treat creatives as their main clients, rather than interest groups. And they should want to preserve as wide an aperture as possible for their clients to do their jobs in, rather than narrowing it, a urine-filled test-tube millimeter at a time.

I’m relieved to know that I can apparently go back to thinking of Louis C.K. as the person I thought he was—though with some newly-acquired doubts about his taste in comedy—after his appearance on The Daily Show last night. Apparently, I—and the people who thought he was mocking Daniel Tosh—was wrong to interpret his Tweet to Tosh praising his television show, sent in the teeth of a…er…vigorous conversation about Tosh’s response to a woman at a show who told him rape jokes weren’t funny, as a show of support. And I’ve rarely been more glad to be wrong. C.K. apparently sent the Tweet while he was on vacation in Vermont, inspired by an episode of Tosh.0 that amused him, and not meant to condone Tosh’s actions at all, given that C.K. was largely offline and was unaware of them (an excuse that if it was anyone else, I’d probably be skeptical of, but that I’m willing to do C.K. the credit of believing). C.K. explained that chain of events—as of the original writing of this post, I thought he’d deleted the relevant tweet, but apparently it’s still in his timeline—and explained his reaction to the controversy since. Watch it:

The key bit is here:

It’s also a fight between comedian and feminists, which are natural enemies, because stereotypically speaking, feminists can’t take a joke…And on the other side, comedians can’t take criticism…I’ve read some blogs during this whole thing that have made me enlightened to things I didn’t know. This woman said how rape is something that polices women’s lives. They have a narrow corridor. They can’t go out late, they can’t go to certain neighborhoods, they can’t get a certain way, because they might get—That’s part of me now that wasn’t before. And I can still enjoy a good rape joke…This is also about men and women…Couples are fighting about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes. That’s what I’ve been reading on blogs. But they’re both making a classic gender mistake on this. Because the women are saying ‘This is how I feel about this.’ But they’re also saying ‘My feelings should be everyone’s primary concern.’ But the men are making this mistake, they’re saying ‘Your feelings don’t matter. Your feelings are wrong, and your feelings are stupid.’…To the men I say, ‘Listen. Listen to what the women are saying for a minute.’ And to the women, I say ‘Now that we heard you, now shut the fuck up for a minute.’

The way C.K. talks about his education in rape culture is the kind of thing that’s made me extend him so much credit in the past—even though, yes, to all the people who’ve sent me disturbing bits he’s done in the past, I’m aware—and the reason I’m willing to reup here. His curiosity is interesting to me, and I think it makes the women in Louie‘s audience, and the audience for C.K.’s shows feel like, even if C.K. crosses our personal lines, there’s a chance that he’s working through something in a way that will be useful to both him and us. And if I thought we could get the same deal he’s proposing here—folks who have been impacted by and have a direct stake in an issue talk, people who are less directly impacted listen, we give them room to think it through—more generally, I’d take it.

Comedian Lizz Winstead has opened for Roseanne Barr, co-created both Air America Radio and The Daily Show, and in May, she published her first book, the essay collection Lizz Free or Die. I loved her tour of Minnesota comedy clubs and behind-the-scenes look at standing up one of the defining progressive cultural institutions of the last decade, and when Daniel Tosh became the center of a wide-ranging conversation about comedy, gender and etiquette this week, she was the first person I wanted to talk to. We talked about the social contract between comedians and their audiences, owning—and executing—material on the highest level, and what she learned from Roseanne. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things you talk about in Lizz Free or Die was how, when your friend Christine suggested you try stand-up, you realized it hadn’t occurred to you that your life could be material because so many of the stand-ups you saw were men.

They weren’t necessarily the comics I love. I wasn’t necessarily an aficionado, but they were the guys I saw doing comedy. I would be watching Carson with my family and there would be a bunch of guys in ties. I think it’s changed dramatically because of everything and the internet. Late night is still notoriously male, the women comics featured to the men comics featured are notoriously low. But women have said “If you’re not going to book us, we’re going to start our own web pages…[When people talk about new female comics they like] I ask, did you find them on late night? And the answer is no, I saw them on Funny or Die, or these cool pop-up shows. Women are forging their own paths. They get to hone their own voices and present what they want outside the limits of a ten-minute routine.

Carlin still throws a long shadow over the industry. Because he could pull off things like rape jokes with a high level of precision, a lot of people seem to miss the point that the key to doing that kind of material is doing it well.

Where I agree with Daniel Tosh is that everything can be funny…people have made all of these things funny. The movie The Aristocrats was hilarious, trying to one-up the most horrible joke ever. Every joke would put the most vulgar, horrible things within the confines of that joke. If there’s funny, there’s no controversy. And if there’s not, there is. I don’t defend anyone who apologizes [for their material], because if they apologize, they didn’t believe it when they said it. Louis [C.K.] and Patton [Oswalt] can be edgy, and Sarah Silverman can be edgy, but they’ve crafted these jokes and they believe in them. If you don’t believe in it, I don’t find it very interesting. Every time, and I can only speak for myself, the question I ask myself is “Do I believe it? And can I defend it?” When you’re a political comic, you’re immediately going to piss off half the people because America is divided. I get death threats from telling my abortion story once a month. Someone wants to rape me or wishes I was dead.

Well and that raises a central question here. How do you think comics should deal with hecklers without getting into ugly territory?

One is how was the audience reacting to the whole thing. Daniel Tosh hasn’t responded and neither has the woman, so we don’t know how this horrible thing was received. That would add a layer, this horrible thing was acceptable to this audience. If Daniel Tosh thinks anything is fair game, just tell those jokes, then. If he’s going on and on, there’s a constrast for a comic and a comedian.

If it’s a comedy club, the contract is the person’s going to get on stage and explore comedy however they see that comedy is. And the contract for the audience member is to come and see that, and you don’t get a guarantee it’s going to make you laugh, but the comedian is going to attempt to make you laugh. But if they’re not attempting to do material, and the article made [it seem like Tosh was discussing concepts rather than telling jokes]…

A comic should have the freedom to go on stage and say whatever they want. The only control you have is what passes your lips. After, you’re saying “I’ve passed this up to be judged.” Everyone else gets to decide whether it’s funny…all the comics say don’t laugh or leave. Those are your options as an audience member. The bigger discussion for me, is if someone walks into a comedy club and gets a lecture about what’s funny or not funny, has that comedian broken the social contract? That’s the question that I would ask because I don’t have any information about the context he was talking about it. It’s all very confusing. The whole thing, we’re talking about so many issues of what people get away with and what they don’t, and at the end of the day, if you’re going to do material that pushes boundaries, you better be fucking funny and know the purpose of why you’re saying those things.
Read more

Louis C.K. apparently decided that, after Daniel Tosh has been the subject of harsh criticism for saying it would be funny if a feminist heckler got gang raped at his show, Tosh is in need of his support. “Your show makes me laugh every time I watch it,” he tweeted. “And you have pretty eyes.” Given C.K.’s long record of comedy that’s self-reflective about privilege and smart about gender—though I do think he’s fallen down both comedically and politically in his attacks on Sarah Palin, and his episode of Louie where he goes after a heckler played by Megan Hilty can be jarring—this is particularly disappointing. Given the reaction I, and other folks, have gotten from comedians today, and a rash of unfortunate attempts at humor that have devolved into bashing women, I kind of think women who care about comedy need C.K.’s championing them more than Daniel Tosh does. And I’m feeling less disappointed by not pulling the trigger on tickets to see him live on this tour.
Read more

I feel like I’ve been kind of hard on comedians on the blog over the past couple of weeks. So bless Louis C.K. for his appearance on the Tonight Show this week, in which he delivered a terrifically funny riff about why he’d like to be a gay man:

Of course, what the riff is really about is what heterosexual men lose and lose out on in the process of vigorously reinforcing their heterosexuality for the general public: the chance to be enthusiastic, to be affectionate, to wear what you want. It’s a critically important conversation, and I’d love to see more men in positions of power in media engage in it, or even who seemed comfortable enough to stop reinforcing their masculinity for a minute.

I’ve been watching screeners of Louie‘s absolutely terrific third season over the past few days—y’all have a real treat coming in your direction at the end of the month—and it got me thinking. Television often revels in the father as a clueless or disconnected figure, whether it’s the cheerful bigotry of Peter Griffin on Family Guy or the raft of shows that treat the very prospect of men raising children as if it’s inherently comedic. In this environment, Louis C.K. has to be the best father on television. That doesn’t mean he’s the most competent father in pop culture, or the best provider—among his bits are his discomfort over the fact that he doesn’t own a home. But his mix of honesty, tenderness, and attempt to pass something like wisdom and honesty along to his daughters, on television and off, make him remarkable. Here are five of the best reasons to hold up Louis C.K. as a role model on Father’s Day.

1. He thinks hard about how to teach his kids about prejudice, America, and the virtue of living life to its fullest: In “Country Drive,” Louie takes his daughters to see an aged female relative—who turns out to be a virulent racist. The lessons he gives in the episodes about how to love your country, respect even your most difficult relatives, and take responsibility for your privilege should be a textbook for all parents who want to raise their kids with awareness of American racism.

2. He’s willing to bury his bitterness about his divorce for his children’s sake: Watching Louie bite his lip as his youngest daughter explained in the first episode of the last season of Louie that she likes her mother’s—Louie’s ex-wife—house better than Louie’s was an exemplar of staying civil, if not together, for the kids. The show is a constant reminder that children have the power to wound as well as to delight. Being a good parent means working through the pain.

3. He’ll protect his daughter’s duckling on a USO trip through Afghanistan: In “Duckling,” one of the best episodes of television of 2011, Louie got saddled with his daughter’s elementary school class ducklings the night before a USO trip—and touched down in a war zone to find he had a baby duck on board. Rather than trying to pass off the responsibility on someone else, Louie nurtured it through Afghanistan. That’s devotion to the family pet, and your child’s happiness.

4. He’ll reconcile with Dane Cook to get his fictional daughters concert tickets: In “Oh Louie / Tickets,” Louie sat down to work out his character’s (and real life) beef with frat comedian Dane Cook to get his daughter concert tickets. Given Cook’s general wretchedness, and the widespread assumption that he stole jokes from C.K., that’s a pretty awesome sacrifice to make for your kids.

5. He’s teaching his daughters that his love for them isn’t linked to their looks: When I interviewed C.K. at the Television Critics Association press tour in January, he told me that he tries never to tell his daughters that he loves them because they’re pretty. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t tell them that they look nice, but he’s trying not to make his love for them feel conditioned on their appearance. It’s an awesome example of thoughtful, feminist parenting.

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.