I think some of you may have noticed that Louis CK is making his comeback, slowly rolling through the podsphere, self-releasing new sets and a new movie and filming a documentary on his controversy for Paramount. Some are already trying to organize boycotts against Paramount. I try to point out that had Louis been criminally charged, either for indecent exposure or sexual harassment, he would be out of jail by now. Not to defend Louis' prior actions, but it's a pertinent question of when and how he should be allowed to work again. (And, honestly, he never really stopped, so the question might be more "when and how should he be allowed back onto mainstream corporate platforms.)
Again, not to defend Louis so much, except to say that I recognize a certain spectrum of offenses here, and it's pretty clear that the severity of the reaction to Louis' comeback is less proportionate to his offenses and far more proportionate to the fame he enjoyed before he was outed. It isn't hard to find examples of other comedians, since Louis' fiasco, who have had similar or worse accusations, and who ducked out of the public eye for a few months, only to emerge when the short public attention span had waned, and have continued to work largely unscathed. Chris D'elia, Bryan Callan, James Veitch, Thomas Middleditch. Now I know what you're thinking: Who the fuck? That's my point. They can get away with because they're not famous, but yet they still work more frequently and less controversially than Louis. And all of them were accused of something worse than sexual exhibitionism, which is grooming underage fans (classic R. Kelly style). So my question is: what's the perspective here?
Exhibit A is more troubling because you can't use his obscurity as cover: Jeff Ross. There's an old saying about comedy clubs that if you want to know how to get in touch with the local drug dealer, spot the unfunny guy who somehow always gets booked. That's Jeff Ross in a nutshell. Ross has power in the comedy industry, a long-standing producer, for Def Jam (Oh! Russell!) and a top executive at Comedy Central in the 00s, running their increasingly lame version of the Friar's Club Roasts (ie, not the Friar's Club Roasts, which continued in tandem without being televised, but somehow getting away with using the name) which, in the valley of its nadir, involved such top-notch comic talent as Pamela Anderson, Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump and Justin Bieber. In other words, it turned an comedy-insider event into a celebrity suck-fest, and it was all due to the guidance of one Jeffery Ross, who has the shriveled testicles to dare call himself the "new Don Rickles".
So, I admit, I'm not an impartial party on this jury. Had Jeff Ross displayed something akin to talent in his career, then maybe I would find it more troubling that he's had multiple credible (documented) accustations of grooming and fucking underage girls. "That was his girlfriend-type. He had that reputation." That article is two years old, and Ross has not suffered the loss of a single gig, and continues to produce multiple mediocre comedy specials for Netflix today. No hashtags, no walkouts, no reckonings. Now, I understand that Ross has denied the charges. So did Aziz Ansari. But no one is going to say that Ross was ever as well-known or as respected as Ansari or Louis CK, but the broad gulf between the nature of these accusations is quite telling. While we debate the future of Louis' stand-up, and generally creative, career, someone like Jeff Ross can walk untouched and unbothered. Maybe we should recognize that there's something really fucked up about that.
crumbsroom wrote:
