Fuck Yeah, Louis C.K.

If anyone has any artwork they have done or collected that has LCK as the subject, please submit it to me. I’d like to share it with everyone. The submit button can be found at the top of the blog. :) I’ll be making an art post at the end of the week so if anyone has anything they’d like to contribute, please do! 

• by Kevin Naulls May 23, 2012 

Fans of Louis CK’sincredibly colourful (and hilarious) standup comedy will be excited to note that he’ll be headlining four shows in Toronto as part of the launch of JFL42, a festival put together by Just For Laughs and LiveNation. The festival runs for eight days from September 21 to 28, and will include, um, 42 acts from various disciplines, ranging from art to comedy, to choose from (a pass entitles the buyers to a reserved seat for a Louis CK show, and the choice of attending several other events). This isn’t your average comedy festival either, because JFL and LiveNation want the user to be involved in creating the schedule—festival passes can be purchased via smart phone, and the acts with the most interest will get the best time slots (the festival also recognizes that some acts may be too popular, and they have committed to setting up at bigger venues or adding extra performance dates and times where possible). Passes go on sale May 25 at 10 a.m. via Ticketmaster, and a full list of the performers will be revealed in June.

Ready for more Louis C.K.? You’re in luck. The comedian released a brand new album, “WORD: Live at Carnegie Hall,” today as a download on his website. Laughspin first reported the news this morning, and although they first indicated that the album would not be released until tomorrow, “Word” is currently available on louisck.net for $5.

The comedian received plenty of accolades for his latest one-hour special, “Live at the Beacon Theater,” which he announced, produced, and independently released within about a month last November. This time, he’s beat his own record by releasing the album without any formal announcement beforehand.

Although some of the material may be familiar to fans of C.K., it has never been released as a special before. He explains on his website:

This is material that I was performing two years ago (about) on a tour that was called “Word”. Some of this material was on my FX show “Louie” in pieces but the entire show in one piece was never released. This show was recorded at Carnegie Hall on November 4, 2010.

His last special before “Beacon Theater,” the concert film and album “Hilarious,” was filmed in April 2009, over a year before his “Word” tour. C.K. is notorious for developing a new hour of comedy each year. “Beacon Theater” will make its TV debut Saturday on FX.

The “Louie” star, who recently swept the Comedy Awards, also released his breakthrough special “Shameless” for $5 on his website

ABC2, Monday, 10pm

COMEDIAN Louis C.K. has developed a cult following in the US, where he has been described by Chris Rock as the ”greatest comic mind of the last quarter century” and by Ricky Gervais as the ”funniest stand-up working in America”. In 2006 he pioneered a raw and bluntly amusing series called Lucky Louie, which was, in fact, so raw and blunt that it was cancelled after just one season. But C.K. is nothing if not a fast learner. Here in this 13-part series he reprises much of the same territory - love, sex, relationships, parenting - with far funnier, not to mention warmer, results.

Filmed with one camera on the streets of New York, this series is a kind of comedy verite, a semi-autobiographical rummage around the everyday mortifications of life as a divorced single dad. (In life, as in the show, C.K. is divorced and shares custody of his two young children.) The show shares DNA with Ricky Gervais’ Extras (the creepy vulnerability, the frankness), Woody Allen (the self-absorption, the nuclear-powered neuroticism) and even Seinfeld (in the interspersing of his live performances), among other things. But it’s C.K.’s nihilism that sets him apart, his ability to let his pet subjects - materialism, selfishness, declining sexuality in the average male - slide right off him in lines that make you laugh despite yourself. His rant tonight about his utter indifference towards poverty is illustrative. It sounds revolting, and it is revolting, but it’s all true: in another life, C.K. would have been a philosopher or a preacher. Tonight’s episode begins in typically disastrous fashion, with Louie accompanying his daughter on a school excursion that goes seriously off the rails. We then sit in on a date that - you guessed it - goes off the rails. Louie spends the whole time looking morose and mopping his forehead, or sitting in the train in his bunched-up suit, while his date, a young spunky woman, sits there, wondering when it will end. This is a dark world; you might as well laugh.