I'm been really surprised by how much I enjoyed Louis CK's show Louie – it has a weird mix of the tragic and the hilarious but yet it all works together rather than pulling in different ways. So when he announced this special and that it would be available for $5 without any restrictions on what computer you can play it on etc, he was going to get my ongoing support. Ironically I watched this in the week when the internet was protesting the SOPA legislation and that the owners of Megaupload were extradited to the US to face a maximum of 55 years in prison each for their terrible crimes against humanity; and while the rights holders of bad, overpriced products continue to try to batter down anyone daring not to pay for the privilege of seeing another generic superhero movie, Louis CK provides a quality product at a good price and trust the audience.
I was happy to pay the $5 to download this – so happy that I didn't even mind that Amazon glitched during payment and I tried Paypal before realising that payment had actually gone through. So for £3 I got this great hour - £3 compared to the usual £12 distributors charge for putting it on a plastic disk and posting to it me. I'm sure this still got pirated, but checking Louis' website shows a note about how much money he made from direct sales and that this will enable him to do more with it. It is good to see people do positive things to challenge piracy, rather than threatening the parents of a 13 year old girl with jail because she downloaded a Justin Bieber song on their internet connection. Anyway, moving on.
As with his TV show, Louis covers a range of topics with honesty and imagination, so that he may be saying terrible, terrible things, but they are never without a root in reality (well, mostly). Talking about wanting to be a good person (but being too selfish or lazy to do so), talking about the hardest thing about being a parent is the boredom and of course many social and sexual situation which he delivers in this usual way – sort of frustrated with how he feels but at the same time unwilling to change for the better. His imaginative delivery and mixed of tiredness with reality works for me.
The reason to watch this special is that it is hilarious. The fact that it is reasonably priced with no draconian controls on the customer and that the money goes to the artist and not the multinational corporation between the customer and the artist is all the more reason for getting it. Louis CK's comedy is clever, insightful and intelligent – no surprise that he has come up with a way to combat piracy that exposes the heavy-handed measure for what they are.
