THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY10, 2020 63
On his first tour since he was accused of sexual misconduct, in 2017, the comedian fails to turn his troubles into art.
THE CRITICS
ON STAGE
BROS’ NIGHT OUT
Louis C.K.’s post-cancellation comeback tour.
BY HILTONALS
ILLUSTRATION BY KELSEY WROTEN
S
ometimes, just for fun, I like to re-
read Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay, “The
White Negro.” In this long, discursive
piece, which covers a number of topics,
from jazz to orgasms and the threat of
atomic destruction, Mailer argues that
the only way for a thinking white man
to be is black. It’s the black guys, he says,
who embody a kind of pure existential-
ism and, thus, an intuitive understand-
ing of the dissonant loneliness at the
heart of modern life. No matter what,
Negroes represent:
Knowing in the cells of his existence that life
was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all excep-
tions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisti-
cated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept
for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived
in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Sat-
urday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of
the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the
body, and in his music he gave voice to the char-
acter and quality of his existence, to his rage and
the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl,
cramp, pinch, scream, and despair of his orgasm.
Despite the triteness and bungling in-
nocence at the heart of Mailer’s approach,
