Few things in our contemporary public square terrify people as much as cancel culture, a phenomenon that seems to literally banish people from society’s platforms as it disappears them from public view. However, recent events appear to demonstrate that the almighty cancel culture may be losing some of its potency as the arbiter of who stays and who gets bounced from public view. In a documentary released during last year’s summer titled “Sorry/Not Sorry,” some female victims of Louis CK’s infamous sexual misconduct scandal, which broke in 2017, lamented what they perceived as him coming through the scandal relatively unscathed.
The said scandal had erupted following a New York Times story in which Louis CK admitted to exposing himself to several of his female colleagues over the years, a development that led shortly thereafter to his banishment from the public square, including cancellation of his then upcoming movie as well as the scrubbing of his work from HBO’s archives.
But the star comedian seems to have made a successful comeback to his career performances after a roughly one- year hiatus, starting out with a show at the legendary Comedy Cellar and then on with other performances that included a sold- out show at Madison Square Garden in 2021. Plus, short of being canceled, he won the Grammy in 2022 for Best Comedy Album and he has been active on the entertainment scene ever since.
As it happens, Louis CK has defied the odds of conventional wisdom before in his career: In December 2011, for instance, he took the unprecedented step of cutting out the proverbial ‘middleman’ from the distribution chain of ticket sales when he made the video of his Standup Special at the Beacon Theater available for direct download by visitors to his website at a fee of just $5.
Yet his apparent victory over cancel culture, while a good thing for other reasons, has nonetheless exposed the dark underbelly of the entertainment ecosystem which is undoubtedly male dominated and even misogynistic in character, a situation that is the not-so-hidden suggestion of the above documentary. In this regard, it is noteworthy that it was Louis CK’s adoring, mostly male, fans plus influential voices in the public opinion arena, including podcasting king Joe Rogan, that have made possible his soft landing. Aside from Louis CK, there is also the case of Dave Chappelle, another male comedy star, who even more easily than Louis CK survived the cancel culture pushback over his attacks on the transgender community.
In the matter of cancel culture, one can see a clear difference between how Dave Chappelle and Louis CK were treated rather less harshly and, in Chappelle’s case, with relative kid gloves, versus how, say, Roseanne Barr and Kathy Griffin were literally blackballed from the public square in the wake of their own misadventures: In May 2018, Barr posted a racist tweet about former Barack Obama aide Valerie Jarrett and shortly thereafter ABC canceled her career comeback sitcom “Roseanne”, while in 2017, Griffin held up a gory image portraying the severed head of Donald Trump and CNN yanked her from her co-hosting gig of the annual New Year’s Eve Broadcast with Anderson Cooper.
Making matters worse, the male comedians in question, unlike their female counterparts, did not seem exactly sorry for what they had done and to the contrary even seemed to come off as rather tone deaf. In Chappelle’s case, he boasted that he enjoyed punching down and for his part Louis CK, who in fact got in trouble for masturbating in front of women, said in his 2019 Comedy Special “Sincerely Louis CK”: “I like jerking off…I’m good at it, too. If you’re good at juggling, you wouldn’t do it alone in the dark. You’d gather folks and amaze them.” For his tone-deaf gag in this album, Louis CK incredibly scored a best comedy album award at the 2022 Grammys, beating out the likes of Lewis Black, Chelsea Handler, and Kevin Hart.
Can anybody really imagine Roseanne Barr, Kathy Griffin or any other female comedian getting away with this sort of behavior? Speaking of which, Louis CK’s getting away with it is not lost on the documentary’s participants either: “Not only did he get away with it, he’s like rubbing it in our faces,” noted Megan Koester, one of the women featured in the documentary.
All things considered, what happened to the aggrieved women in the documentary is rather unfortunate, as is Louis CK’s apparent non-apology apology for his misdeeds. Yet, in the interest of not throwing away the baby with the bath water, we ought to acknowledge something of a bright side to all this, which is really something worth taking inspiration from, not least for all those concerned about the outsized negative impact of cancel culture on our public square and its discourse. What may be emerging here is the reality that cancel culture, as it turns out, may not be the sort of terrifying and formidably brutal force that it has been cracked up to be; plus, of course, the pleasing fact that cancel culture’s backlash can be overcome, hopefully only in deserving situations, by the concerted action of a self-confident and forgiving society.
More importantly, for our society to get the full benefit of this positive development, now that the door of forgiveness seems to be opening, it is vital that the sort of apparent second chance accorded to Louis CK must similarly be extended to all deserving players in our public square, whether they be men or women. Perhaps especially women and other disadvantaged groups. Human beings make mistakes and the path to rehabilitation must remain open to all who have done their time and are willing to make amends for their misdeeds, cancel culture be damned. Let us dare to celebrate the bright flip side of the coin in the Louis CK sexual misconduct scandal.
