Louis C. K.
Louis C. K.
Louis Székely pronounced , known professionally as Louis C.K., is an American comedian, actor, writer, producer, director, and editor. Born in Washington, D.C., C.K. moved to Mexico City as an infant and learned Spanish as his first language, learning English once he moved back to the U.S. at age 7. He began his career writing for several comedy shows in the 1990s and early 2000s for comedians including David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, and Chris Rock. Also in this period, he was...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth2 September 1967
CountryUnited States of America
My ex-wife, she really didn't like the material that I did. And that's something I regret, that I wasn't more careful about making sure that she was O.K. with it. I just sort of didn't ask. So that's how that goes.
If you had a jetpack you'd be like I have the shittiest jetpack. Who's your service provider on your jetpack? Did they make the new one? I hate this thing.
There's a huge amount of work that goes into placating a network in regular television. It's literally 70% or 80% of your workload, is showing them the material, getting their notes and presenting it to them and making sure they weigh in. It's a huge amount of work.
To me, comedies are usually the least funny movies. Movies that are actually a comedy are usually not all that funny. To me Goodfellas and Raging Bull are two of the funniest movies I ever saw.
I remember the day I saw my hair was thinning. I don't remember caring much. I don't care. It's just hair. It never bothered me much. I was pretty young, too. And it happened and is happening very slowly. I have a feeling dead people get really mad when we complain about losing hair.
Credibility lasts about two cycles of bad material, and then you'll probably never get it back. If you let people down, that's really hard to come back from - harder than climbing from nothing to something, even.
It's just a big excuse to say awful things.
I don't feel those limits when I'm on stage. For some reason, audiences let me get away with things. Remember, it's all comedy. Words. Thoughts. All thoughts are safe and worth exploring.
You have to be really tenacious. You have to keep at it. There are many roads to get there. If you can get yourself into Harvard, that's a good way to go, because every Harvard graduating class, the agencies come trolling around and they'll look for you. So if you go to Harvard, you'll get found there.
Everybody is different. Some comedy is more musical like Steven Wright. His is a pillar of comedy to me. He invented a whole form and all his jokes are poems. So it's different. I wanted to do it like George Carlin. Now I do it like me.
I could never sit down and write jokes.
There's a need to perfect things in a writers' room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It's a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something.
Sometimes I just want to tell a story regardless of whether it fits what the show is saying. I've been in a lot of writing rooms where somebody says an idea and everyone's dying, like laughing so they're delirious. It's like a black hole in a good way, everything starts to fall into it, you know what I mean.
I like being full, every day, with stuff that I have to do.