Richard Pryor was angry. It was 1972, and Pryor was in the south of France shooting a movie called Hit! with Billy Dee Williams. He brought his girlfriend Patricia Heitman along and, at one point during the trip, she allegedly walked in on Pryor in bed with a hooker. According to biographer Scott Saul, Pryor then invited Patricia to join in the action. When she declined, Pryor flew into a rage, expressing his displeasure by beating her, tearing her clothes off, and throwing her out of the room. Patricia, not one to be cowed, got back at him later by sprinkling rat poison in his socks and underwear.

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It was hardly the first time Pryor had mistreated a woman (he once beat his first wife for serving him potatoes he didn’t like), and Patricia’s rat poison stunt would hardly deter him from it going forward. Back in LA, he would again rip off Patricia’s clothes and toss her out onto the street, naked. While she was locked out, desperate for clothing and shelter, he burned her coat in the fireplace. Later in life, Pryor confessed to beating women on air to Barbara Walters and explained himself thusly:

“They pissed me off. I'm sorry to say that. I know emotionally inside of me, because I was weak. That's really the reason. I was weak.”

In a way, Pryor got lucky because even as he confessed to his monstrousness in public, the bulk of his career came at a time when such transgressions were, unforgivably, easily shrugged off by the media and powerbrokers alike. He was still revered, rarely shamed by anyone outside of himself. Perhaps the public regret he expressed to Walters was enough to merit some measure of forgiveness, and perhaps people also took into hard consideration the fact that Pryor himself was abused as a child, at the hands of both a boy who molested him in an alleyway, and his own grandmother, a Peoria madam who would beat him regularly when Pryor’s father wasn’t around to do the job himself.

Or perhaps fans just didn't want their memories of the man tarnished. Regardless of whether or not Pryor truly earned absolution, it came to him anyway. He was given the Mark Twain Prize in 1998, a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2006, and a fawning Comedy Central retrospective in 2003. He remains, both in work and reputation, the most admired comedian in history.

"A lot of times, you’re getting a presentation of the truth from a comic but not the real thing."

Louis C.K. is in deep shit. The New York Times dropped a bomb on him last week that details, in what has become exhaustively typical, the exploits of a man leveraging his power to subject unwilling women to his own strangely specific sexual urges, and essentially daring anyone to stop him. This comes just as C.K. was poised to release the horribly titled I Love You, Daddy, a film that, going by initial reviews, appeared to serve as part-confessional and part-justification. Or maybe it’s just the work of a narcissist seeing how far he could push things before getting caught. That movie’s release has now been cancelled.

The stories about C.K. were not new. Until last week, they lingered in the ether and bounced off of C.K., in part because his accusers had yet to formally go on the record, and because of C.K.’s enormous standing in the comedy community, where his accomplishments arguably match that of Pryor, his forebear in both confessional humor and, apparently, demeaning the opposite sex.

Now let’s talk about that community for a minute, because it is very insular and VERY protective. If you go by the list of greatest comedians of all time, it’s a community that has harbored a great number—perhaps a disproportionate number—of misogynists, abusers and shitbags. Dozens of women say Bill Cosby is a rapist. Woody Allen’s daughter says he raped her, a claim he has denied. Actress Tisha Campbell filed a lawsuit against Martin Lawrence claiming sexual harassment and battery on the set of Martin, harassment so severe that she apparently had producers ban him from the set of his own show. Given what we know about Hollywood these days, it’s a wonder that they accommodated her request.

These are not sad clowns. These are all very famous, very powerful men who in hindsight, appear to have used comedy to mask the truth more than illuminate it. In fact, it’s telling that C.K. fell upon the “I have issues” defense when one woman said she confronted him about jacking off in front of women. When confronted, comedians have a nasty habit of defensiveness, and of playing up the background issues that drive them to crave yuks. And, for too long, the comedy world has indulged that ruse, letting a guy like C.K. invite your pity if he can’t get laughs out of you.

You can already mine old episodes of Louie for grotesque warning signs of this, including a scene where he attempts to rape fellow comedian Pamela Adlon’s character. Or you can watch this extremely uncomfortable vignette featuring him dressing down a female audience member who has the temerity to chit-chat during his act.

Now this scene is “pretend,” but this is still a rough exchange:

“You’re making jokes about rape,” the woman complains.

“You don’t like rape?” C.K. asks from the stage. “That’s really weird because you wouldn’t even exist if your mom hadn’t raped that homeless Chinese guy…. Can you do me a favor? Can you please just die of AIDS? Does anybody have AIDS that can put their dick in her face and get her started on that?”

It doesn’t end there. Because after ripping the woman on stage, C.K.’s character lectures her AFTER the set about her rudeness. “A good person wouldn’t (interrupt a set), so you must be a bad person,” he tells her. “You have no right to talk to me like that,” she counters.

“Actually I do,” and then Louie ropes in fellow comedians, including Todd Barry, to further explain. “These guys—comedians, me—these guys don’t have a life! This is all they have. Their days are shit. They don’t have many friends. They don’t have families. They have this. The only good part of their lives are the 15 minutes that they get to be on stage, maybe once a week, sometimes once a month. And YOU took that 15 minutes… and you ruined it.”

There is a deft manipulation to this scene, with C.K. setting up a straw woman to “challenge” him and then knocking her down as his comic buddies (all guys) nod approvingly in the background. Even filmed in Louie’s now widely imitated artsy-fartsy style, it’s a pretty blatant rallying cry to other comedians who are apparently tortured by the scourge of people talking at comedy clubs. In the scene, the woman Louie berates is the worst person in history for daring to infringe upon his precious 15 minutes of freedom. She’s the criminal and she deserves whatever horrible shit C.K. throws at her because she fails to understand how unhappy he is in his resting state. It’s the tired old tortured comedian trope, only weaponized.

And even with a new generation of diverse and talented performers coming up, there is still this brand of toxicity lingering in the comedy world, borne of the strange and deathly seriousness with which many comedians, including C.K., venerate their craft. No one takes himself more seriously than a comedian. The industry is still mostly a tribal boy’s club where the boys involved treat ANY criticism as a constraint on their precious freedom to “workshop” bad jokes. It’s the same line of defense mechanisms employed by every online chode in the Trump age (myself included), and it’s just as feeble coming from a live performer.

That’s why comedians like Jim Norton leapt to Daniel Tosh’s defense when he got in trouble for joking about how funny it would be if a woman at one of his shows got raped by five men. Or why David Cross gave a completely limp apology to actress Charlyne Yi for a racist remark by saying he was “in character” at the time. Or why, once Gawker put out a blind item about a famous comedian masturbating in front of women, another comedian, Doug Stanhope, went on Facebook and brazenly confessed that it was HIM. That sure as hell read like Stanhope was providing cover for C.K. (whom Stanhope presumably thought stood more to lose), but after the Times report, Stanhope now says that confession was a joke.

There is always an excuse, or a misunderstanding, and somehow the comedian ends up playing the victim. The quest for laughter is pure and good and anyone who complains is just a humorless prick who should be more sensitive to the comedian’s primal need to stretch the boundaries of good taste. The fact that being a comedian is both hard and lonely—you sharpen your act all day and then hang out all night at some dump of a comedy club jockeying for stage time next to a dozen other comedians who all want you dead, before finally getting a chance to perform in front of customers who can be drunk, distracted, and possibly ungrateful—only furthers the justification.

I grew up idolizing Pryor. I kept every Pryor album meticulously arranged in my little Case Logic cassette case, just as I did tapes of raunchy comics like Eddie Murphy, Sam Kinison, and Andrew Dice Clay. All of those men not only complained about women, but made it a centerpiece of their act. Eddie Murphy Raw is basically a 90-minute screed about greedy women, and how you can tame them by making them come hard. Kinison had a bit where he sought out a dude in the audience who had been wronged by a woman, and then would phone the woman, live on stage, to call her a bitch and a cunt. Listen to Kinison’s act today and it basically sounds like a Reddit MRA forum turned into a stage show. But I remember being drawn to all those guys because 1. They cursed, and 2. I thought they were being brutally honest.

But they weren’t. It was always a bit suspicious that Kinison never got a busy signal when he called. And even though Pryor would incorporate real personal tragedies into his act, he wasn’t always 100 percent forthcoming. He used to tell a famous joke about his dad dying during sex. “He came and went at the same time,” was the line, and it’s a good one. But Pryor carefully stripped the whole event of context. In real life, Pryor’s dad reportedly died of a heart attack while molesting his own 13-year-old daughter, Pryor’s half-sister. A lot of times, you’re getting a presentation of the truth from a comic but not the real thing.

C.K., too, had a rep for being painfully honest, particularly in regard to his own shortcomings as a husband, father, and man in general. On stage, he came off as more enlightened than Kinison and his ‘80s contemporaries. Looking back, it feels like C.K.’s entire oeuvre was less a deployment of harsh truths than a deft way of laundering them, masking his truly unforgivable behavior. He was strategically vulnerable. Always in control of his own narrative. He almost certainly got more catharsis out of his act than his audience did. C.K. also had a habit of presuming his own personal flaws—his inner racism, his sexual hang-ups, etc.—were universal aspects of the human condition. I know that playbook well, and it’s often used by a white dude who thinks everyone else thinks like a white dude.

You can even see how C.K. launders the truth in the public apology he issued on Friday. At first blush, it reads like a self-aware and honest confession, until you realize that A) He never once mentions about how he lied about the allegations for years, B) He never actually says sorry, and C) You don’t get to plead ignorance about penile etiquette when you’re a 50-year-old man.

It seems dumb to castigate an artist for bending the truth when an artist has no obligation to do so. Even now, I feel like a fucking dope for feeling somewhat betrayed by C.K., a man I’ve never even met. But like Pryor, he was a man who rose to prominence as more than just a comedian, but as a sage truth-teller, willing to point out things about society that society itself couldn’t bear to talk about. (This is especially true of Pryor's brilliant observations on race.) C.K.’s brand was his realness, and he was so gifted at his job that it was hard not to buy into him. He could get an audience to believe anything he said, which is its own form of power. It’s likely he cherished that supreme control as much as he did the actual laughter. One anonymous source told Jezebel that C.K. would allegedly threaten his victims’ careers if they talked. For a long time, they didn’t.

"I’m tired of comedians martyring themselves. I’m tired of them being overly defensive, misanthropic assholes. And I dread the possibility of C.K. smoothly incorporating all this grossness into his act a year from now on the comeback trail."

Artie Lange once framed comedy as an addiction, one of many he admits he’s had to juggle throughout his adult life. “Ask any comedian, when an audience erupts at something you say, nothing else matters,” he wrote in his second (!) autobiography. “It’s like tossing a bucket of blood into the water when a hungry shark is around: once a comedian gets a taste for laughter, they’ll hunt it down by whatever means necessary.” And that’s telling, because it’s a reminder that laughs are the ONLY goal in comedy, and that everything used in service of getting them is mostly illusory, including the truth. You, the comedy enjoyer, are a mark. Lange, like other comedians, wants you to think that this addiction is some kind of plight, when really it’s just a way of selling their own personal misery to justify whatever jokes they need to make to get their fix.

And it’s getting very, very old. I’m tired of comedians martyring themselves. I’m tired of them being overly defensive, misanthropic assholes. And I dread the possibility of C.K. smoothly incorporating all this grossness into his act a year from now on the comeback trail. Now that show business is at least making a half-hearted effort to get its act together and cast out the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, C.K. may not necessarily enjoy the latter-day canonization that Pryor enjoyed as he struggled with MS over the final decades of his life. He will be shunned. His movie is scrapped. HBO, FX, and Netflix have already bailed.

But it’s still way past time for the comedy community to address the pervading mentality that let C.K. thrive for so long. It’s time for comedians to get over themselves, because this job is not some glorious exercise in free speech. It’s just a laugh hunt, and I never wanna hear another goddamn hint about how it’s anything more than that. Because that’s when it becomes a bunch of weak men finding ways to excuse their weakness, failing to realize that it’s 2017 and a lot of their bullshit isn’t funny anymore, and that they aren’t the only people who get to be angry.