Before He Plays the Bay, a List of 10 Horrible Things Louis C.K. Has Done

Louis C.K. is performing in the Bay Area this week because nobody cares about women.

Fresh from one of the most aggravating Grammy wins in history (and boy, that list is long), ol’ just-can’t-keep-it-in-his-pants is performing at venues in San Francisco and Oakland that we don’t feel like promoting, on Jan. 4 and 5, respectively. Tickets to those shows are already sold out.

Since a whole mess of Bay Area humans are willingly giving money and attention to Chuckles McFondleshimself, now seems like a good time to revisit all of the things that C.K. did that were supposed to ruin his career, but merely delayed its progress for about five minutes.

Get ready to grind your teeth and hide under a blanket, because everything listed here is freakin’ gross.

1. Audibly masturbating in 2003 during a professional phone conversation with Abby Schachner, who subsequently cited the incident as one of the reasons she quit comedy.
2. Inviting comedy duo Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov to his hotel room for a drink in 2002, then promptly taking off all of his clothes and masturbating in front of them. Neither women consented to bear witness to such a thing, and when they told other comedians, the backlash in the comedy community was against them, not C.K.
3. Asking actress and producer Rebecca Corry in 2005 if he could masturbate in front of her. C.K. was making a guest appearance on Corry’s TV show at the time. He was also married and awaiting the birth of his second child.
4. Repeatedly describing sexual fantasies and touching himself in front of a younger female colleague on The Chris Rock Show in the ’90s.
5. Making light of the emotional and professional toll his indecent behavior had on all the women he exposed himself to. “I don’t like being alone, that’s all I can tell you,” C.K. said on the Grammy-winning album which shall remain nameless. “I get lonely. It’s just sad. I like company. I like to share. I’m good at it, too. If you’re good at juggling, you wouldn’t do it alone in the dark.”
6. Making Tig Notaro (Tig Notaro!) feel complicit in his abusive behavior. “He released my album [in 2012] to cover his tracks,” Notaro told the New York Times in 2017. “He knew it was going to make him look like a good guy, supporting a woman.”
7. Returning to the stage in 2018, one year after saying he would “step back and take a long time to listen.”
8. Belittling Parkland school shooting survivors. “You’re not interesting because you went to a high school where kids got shot,” C.K. said in a 2018 set. “Why does that mean I have to listen to you? Why does that make you interesting? You didn’t get shot, you pushed some fat kid in the way, and now I gotta listen to you talking?”
9. Doing racist bits about how penis size correlates to ethnicity, trying to make child molestation funny, and continuing to use the homophobic F-word in 2021.
10. Mocking nonbinary and trans people’s pronoun requests. “They’re like royalty, they tell you what to call them,” he said in a 2018 set. “‘You should address me as they/them, because I identify as gender neutral.’ Oh, OK. OK. You should address me as ‘there’ because I identify as a location. And the location is your mother’s c–t.”

A plethora of comedy fans will say it’s time to forgive and forget; it’s time we lighten up and give C.K. a break. But C.K. has already received breaks for years on end, as many in the comedy community willfully glossed over and ignored his flagrant harassment of women. (Reports suggest that C.K.’s behavior was an open secret from about 2012 on.) C.K.’s unrepentant return is a slap in the face to all sexual harassment survivors and the kind of thing that makes Bill Cosby think it’s fine for him to return to the stage too. (Because apparently we’ve got that to look forward to this year as well…)

There’s nothing funny about any of it.