‘Louis CK: Sorry/Not Sorry’ is an honest and compelling documentary about a prominent #MeToo case

The new film explores the downfall of the A-list comedian and how we think about #MeToo seven years on.

Image: The New York Times

The #MeToo movement exploded into the public consciousness in the fall of 2017, leading to the downfalls of the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer, and R. Kelly.

And about five minutes after all that started, whispers began that “#MeToo has gone too far!” Things have gotten too difficult for me, the argument went, and these cases are being adjudicated with insufficient due process. 

Later arguments went much further, including full-throated defenses of office romances and even student/professor affairs. In most cases, I found these “#MeToo has gone too far” arguments rather unpersuasive, 

The case of comedian Louis C.K. is emblematic. Depending on one's perspective, his ultimate punishment is seen as either too punitive or not punitive enough. 

Louis C.K., as of early 2017, was the most successful stand-up comedian in the country, putting out annual acclaimed specials while also carving out a career as an auteur, especially with his FX series Louie and Better Things. I was, I acknowledge, a huge fan of his work. 

But then, that fall, the New York Times came out with an expose in which several women stated that Louis had made the habit of masturbating in front of them. The comedian then issued a statement admitting that the stories were true. 

This led to the cancellation of Louie, his removal from Better Things, and the cessation of any mainstream movie or TV roles, and the end of his comedy specials landing on Netflix or HBO. A movie he directed, I Love You Daddy, had its release abruptly canceled (thanks to awards screeners, I’m one of the few who has actually seen that film.) 

Seven years later, Louis C.K. is not really “canceled,” but his career hasn’t returned to where it was. 

The way it’s shaken out is that he can no longer create or star in TV shows or movies that receive mainstream distribution, nor can his specials debut on major platforms. He used to be praised as a genius in places like The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, which now ignore his work. And his show Louie — one of the most critically acclaimed and beloved of its era — has been all but memory-holed.

That said, his stand-up comedy career has recovered. Louis tours nationwide, filling theaters and arenas, and he appears to have the unanimous support of the upper-echelon comedy community (or, to be clear, of the men in it). While he sells his standup specials and other projects through his websites, he won a Grammy in 2022 for a comedy album.

Now, we have a new documentary directed by Caroline Suh and Cara Moines, which provides a fair and eye-opening analysis of all of this. 

The documentary, produced in conjunction with the New York Times, is called Louis C.K.: Sorry Not Sorry and it provides a 360-degree view of all of this. Like W. Kamau Bell’s We Need to Talk About Cosby, the film acknowledges that Louis was a figure of cultural consequence prior to the scandal (although not to Cosby’s degree) but that his offenses really did sully all of that (although also, once again, not to Cosby’s degree.) 

Louis himself did not participate in the documentary, although it includes a massive amount of archival footage, including multiple old interviews in which fellow future #MeToo casualties like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose are interviewing Louis. 

The film goes into something often forgotten about the Louis scandal in particular: There were rumors and whispers about this for a number of years. Comedian Jen Kirkman told a story on a podcast that sounded a lot like she talking about Louis harassing her. There were blind and later not-so-blind items in Gawker and its associated websites. Even Louis himself put lots of references to masturbatory shame in his stand-up act and FX show, although he denied the rumors when he was asked about them directly. 

We hear from Kirkman and other Louis accusers, as the film shows that Louis breached the trust of the people he worked with, most of whom had much less power than he did. 

One defense — he asked permission — doesn’t pass the laugh test. What if someone did that to you in your office? Or your wife, sister, or daughter? The documentary, unfortunately, leaves out any reference to the classic McSweeney’s piece about the need to rehire “Steve the Masturbator” for his office job. 

Louis also committed the Lance Armstrong-style transgression by spending years denying his transgressions and taking active measures to hurt the careers of his (truthful) accusers. 

With all of that, Louis has been welcomed, with open arms, back to the comedy world, and it doesn’t appear that any major comedy venue in the country has any qualms about hosting him. 

That leads into an uglier part of the documentary: the way that the comedy world, nearly to a man, seems to believe that Louis did nothing wrong and was also the victim of all of this. 

Bill Maher, the media’s most prolific defender of all varieties of sexual harassment, believes Louis is a victim of wokeness. Dave Chappelle is seen in the film, in one of his Netflix specials, mocking the very notion that anyone would object to Louis jerking off in front of them. It shows again that modern-era Chappelle’s most bedrock belief — even more than transphobia — is that no bad things should ever happen to his celebrity friends. 

A lot of people in comedy seem to believe that being a huge piece of shit is an unalienable right. Therefore, Louis was horribly victimized by suffering the career consequences for serial sexual harassment. As Seth Simons frequently points out in his indispensable newsletter Humorism, today’s comedy world has seemingly limitless tolerance for horrific behavior by comedians, whether it’s a history of sexual misconduct, racism, Nazi ties, and anything else.

How much should Louis really be punished for what he did? He never faced criminal charges, and it doesn’t appear that anyone ever sued him. In his act at one point, he says that he “lost” $35 million, which likely represents what he had left on contracts with Netflix, FX, and whoever else, although all those sold-out arena shows likely got him a big chunk of that money back. 

That question does not have an easy answer, but I give credit for the documentary for exploring all sides of it.

Louis CK: Sorry Not Sorry is available on VOD. I’m not really sure why it’s not on Hulu as part of the Times’ “New York Times presents…” series, but perhaps it would be too weird to put Louis back on something FX-branded.