Louis CK on the five types of things you shouldn't say...
...and why you need to say them onstage. CK: "A very powerful thing about comedy [is] it's an opportunity to say stuff that's not appropriate."
In real life there are things you never say because they’re too private, stupid, crazy, not cool, and/or wrong. According to Louis CK (in an interview with Theo Von), those are exactly the things you should say onstage.
There's great power as a comedian in being okay with uncomfortable feelings, with being okay when you’ve just brought something up and they're like “uhhh” and it gets tight in there. That tightness is useful and there's a place to take that.
And then when they start to calm down a little bit they're like: I don't even know where I am now, this is weird. You see it in their face like: I've never laughed at this before and so now I'm in a new place in my mind. That's, I think, a very powerful thing about comedy because it's an opportunity to say stuff that's not appropriate.
It's either you're saying something because it's too private, you're oversharing. Like, I'm gonna tell you something really personal. You shouldn't have said that because usually, in a real, regular conversation, or in politics or whatever, you don't say things like that.
The other “you shouldn't have said” is because it's so stupid, just a stupid thing everybody knows that's not true what are you saying.
The other one is “that's f– crazy.” That's crazy, that doesn't make any sense.
The other one is like: “Man, that's not cool.” That's not cool to say that. Nobody likes that. That makes people mad.
And then there's just like “that's wrong.” That's morally wrong to say that.
If you can take people to those places, which are all fear places, fear of intimacy, fear of the insane, which is a good, interesting kind of fear, fear of the truth, or fear of castigation by the masses, fear of morality, of badness – if you can take people to those places and make them laugh, make them happy, give them a feeling like “this is okay,” then suddenly they're there safely and that's expanding where you're willing to go with your mind.
Because the mind is a cage and it keeps you from seeing life. There's so much to life outside of what you're supposed to be thinking about.
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