Louis CK has gone back to comedy. As the entire Internet must know by now, the comedian/showrunner/auteur/inspiration-for-every-moody-half-hour-comedy-drama-by-an-indie-comedian put on a surprise set at the Comedy Cellar last Sunday, marking his first set since the New York Times published five women’s allegations that he had either made them watch him masturbate, or tried to do so. Several women said that they’d lost professional opportunities and been sidelined from their careers because they were thought to pose an obstacle to CK’s success. In a statement, CK admitted the allegations were true.

Louis CK is the umpteenth man to attempt a post-#MeToo comeback. (Matt Lauer, Mario Batali, Charlie Rose… the list, doubtless, will continue to grow.) But, above and beyond the question of whether the culture can or should “move on” from abuses of power like the ones CK committed (in my opinion, we should not), there’s the question of whether Louis CK, specifically, has anything more to contribute as an artist. I don’t think he does.

If you were a fan of CK’s work, there was a specific bargain that you entered into: He would always give you something ugly about himself, something pitiable or gross, and you would laugh at it together. The draw was his dangerous honesty, the thrill of a guy making himself completely vulnerable to his audience. (You could call it “self-exposing,” but, well…) He would talk about the self-loathing he felt after masturbation, about being confused and overwhelmed by women’s sexual needs, about the toxicity of being a man in America. Here’s a bit I loved: “The courage it takes for a woman to say yes [to a date] is beyond anything I can imagine… How do women still go out with guys when you consider that there’s no greater threat to women than men? Globally and historically, we’re the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease.”

You see the problem. He was saying men, and he meant me.

Finding “accidentally” self-revealing CK jokes is like shooting a fish in a barrel. One bit on his show, in which he debated a Christian anti-masturbation activist, ended with him angrily informing the woman that “later, I’m going to masturbate, and I’m going to be thinking about you. And there’s nothing you can do about it.” In another joke, compiled by The Cut, he claims that masturbating is invariably “followed by the deepest self-hate and depression you’ve ever felt,” not mentioning that, hey, maybe he feels bad about himself because he assaulted some colleagues in the process.

Louis CK specialized in a comedy of complicity. By listening to him talk about what was wrong with him, you affirmed that he was the most reliable authority on his actions and their impact. You agreed to take his side. But a half-implied confession embedded in a joke is not the same as transparency: in fact, the whole time the voice of radical honesty in comedy was concealing a large, horrifying part of his life for many years. When the charming fuck-up does something genuinely unforgivable, where is there left for him to go? How can he ask the audience to take his side, to trust him, now that we know he lied?

The whole time the voice of radical honesty in comedy was concealing a large, horrifying part of his life for many years.

CK reportedly did not grapple with these questions in his new set, which avoided all mention of the sexual misconduct allegations. (Though he did, apparently, include a joke about rape whistles: “I was just sitting there like oh my fuck. This is so uncomfortable and so disgusting,” a female audience member says. “Everyone around me was laughing. That was just depressing.”) This only adds insult to injury. When he admitted to sexual misconduct, CK claimed he was ready for self-reflection and accountability: “There is nothing about this that I forgive myself for. And I have to reconcile it with who I am,” he wrote, adding that he would “step back and take a long time to listen.” That “long time” turned out to be less than a year, and his tactic for “reconciling” the allegations with his public image is apparently to pretend they didn’t happen and just merrily keep making rape-related jokes in the hopes they still get laughs.

As he plots his comeback, what is CK envisioning? Does he still see a flock of adoring hipsters filling stands for his shows? Comedy blogs cooing about how often he refreshes his set, TV critics making awed comparisons to Truffaut and Godard? Does he see the feminist blogs posting gushing commentary on how he really gets it, the magazine covers praising his (ooof) “dirty wisdom?” Does he think, in other words, that things are going to go back to normal?

I don’t know. But I know that there’s no way for CK to approach anything like his old pre-eminence in the comedy world without doing damage. The more he’s welcomed back into the industry, the more his harassment and misconduct will be normalized, and the more the world will get the message that it’s okay to tolerate and enable abusive men.

“I have other comedians work here who I've heard accusations of worse things than Louis, worse than sexual harassment,” claimed Comedy Cellar owner Greg Dworman, when defending his choice to let CK perform. The idea that the whole comedy world might be riddled with harassers or abusers — something tacitly enabled when the most widely praised and influential comic of the age is also known to harass women — was offered as an excuse for CK’s presence, and not, you know, the whole reason he should be kept out.

CK’s comeback would undeniably be popular with a very specific audience — the angry men filling women’s mentions right now with complaints about how #MeToo has gone “too far” or yelling that there’s nothing wrong with what he did to those women. Maybe Louis CK could build an entire career off applause from angry white men; our President seems to have done it. He could be their favorite comic, the one who goes up on stage and tells “charming” stories about humiliating and scaring women. He could assure all those men that they’re normal, just like him, and that what they did wasn’t actually unforgivable. And Louis CK would confirm, with each joke he told, that he was beyond redemption.

I don’t expect Louis CK to be a good man. My fandom is toast. But I did expect him to be smarter than this. If he cares at all about the legacy of his work, if any part of his “self-aware” act translated to genuine self-awareness, then he shouldn’t want to go out like this. If he can’t think about this like a decent person, he can think about it like a decent comedian: Any good performance depends on knowing when to leave the stage.

Sady Doyle Sady Doyle is the author of 'Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear ...

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