'Kids Are Like Buckets of Disease That Live in Your House': Louis C.K. Gnaws on Fatherhood in Chewed Up

‘100 Funniest Comedy Albums’ Book Excerpt

Frank Mastropolo

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Louis C.K.’s 2008 Showtime concert film and CD Chewed Up was recorded at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, “about a block from my first apartment after I moved out of my mom’s house when I was 18, back in 1986,” said C.K. Chewed Up was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Special in 2009.

“I think a lot of specials, people get carried away with the word ‘special,’” C.K. told The Comic’s Comic. “There’s a temptation to make yourself look like a star. They say they make you want to look like a rock star when you come out. I’m not a rock star. So, why?

“They put chandeliers in the theater, and the place gets bigger and bigger, and the comic gets smaller and smaller. They make everything brighter so you can see everyone in the audience, and then they’ll cut to people in the audience for their reactions.

“Richard Pryor: Live in Concert and Bill Cosby: Himself are the greatest. All of Carlin’s specials are great in their own way. But those two are the hallmark. It’s just a dude on stage doing his act. For a bulk of the material, there’s no backdrop. I wanted it to feel like a live concert. Not a television event.”

C.K. addresses everything from his dislike for deer to the myth that drinking milk will replenish a man during sex. C.K. talks at length about the frustrations of fatherhood.

“Chewed Up has almost nothing about marriage in it,” C.K. told the Dead-Frog website. “I don’t really talk about my wife until the last bit where I say that I miss her sexually and I get why she doesn’t fuck me. That’s the last thing I said about her. The majority of the bits are about me and the kids and my age.”

Kids are like buckets of disease that live in your house, and you get sick from them all the time.

Last week, I had a flu that I caught because my daughter coughed into my mouth, just hit me right in the back of the throat. Why thanks, honey, I’m sick right now. I can feel it already. She did this, by the way, because she was trying to tell me a secret and she thinks you tell secrets into people’s mouths.

And by the way, she’s five, five years old. What secret does she have that I really need to hear? Like, she’s going to tell me a secret, and I’m going to go holy shit, are you serious? Oh my God. Honey, I won’t tell anybody. That is fucked up, seriously. She got an abortion on Christmas Eve? Oh my God.

C.K. added a special feature to the Chewed Up DVD, explaining why he chose to be authentic.

I like to do stand-up that’s very honest. I don’t think it’s the only way to be a comedian. Some people, the whole point of their act is that they’re lying or being fantastic or really silly or absurd.

I think Steven Wright is a great comedian. Nobody says, “God, he’s so honest.” He’s not one of those guys. He just has a whole different thing that makes him funny and makes him great.

For me, what guides what I decide to say or do onstage or not is, “Is this shit really true? Is this really shit you’re thinking?” If it’s not, you’re gonna feel phony and stupid. I don’t like phony. I don’t like it for me. 

To me, it’s not important on an integrity level. It’s just that it’s so much more fun to say shit that’s really inside you, that really gnaws at your brain, and to share those thoughts with other people.

Frank Mastropolo is the author of 100 Funniest Comedy Albums, part of the Greatest Performances series. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.