Opinion: This film is chilling reminder of how ‘not sorry’ Louis C.K. is

Opinion by Sara Stewart

(CNN) — “Sorry/Not Sorry,” in theaters Friday, revisits the 2017 comedy-world firestorm involving five women’s accounts of sexual misconduct by comedian Louis C.K. and the aftermath in which he was welcomed back onstage. Unsurprisingly, it lands pretty definitively on “not sorry.”

The documentary, from directors Caroline Suh and Cara Mones and produced by the New York Times, features interviews with some of the women involved in outing C.K.: comedian Jen Kirkman, whose accounts of C.K.’s sexual comments to her early in her career were some of the earliest public mentions; Megan Koester, a comic and journalist who attempted to investigate the allegations against C.K. only to be shut down; and Abby Schachner, a comic and writer who went public with her account of C.K. very obviously masturbating while on the phone with her.

What it notably does not have are any major female comedians talking about what they knew about C.K., what they think about his relatively quick comeback or the fact that the comedy industry continues to be a hotbed of misogyny. According to Rolling Stone, “Every major comic was asked, Suh admitted in a Q&A after the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Everyone declined.” (Including C.K., who has not commented on the film.)

Per the New York Times expose in 2017, In each of the five women’s accounts, C.K. either asked them if he could masturbate in front of them, or simply did so without their consent. (In one woman’s account, this took place over the phone.) In a piece published on his website after the story, C.K. wrote that “these stories are true.  At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my d–k without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your d–k isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them.”

It was a statement largely viewed as a non-apology at best. Then it was followed by C.K.’s Grammy-winning 2022 album “Sincerely Louis C.K.,” in which he joked about the behavior as a sexual hangup rather than abuse.

The lack of known women in comedy in “Sorry/Not Sorry” is a meta commentary on the film’s exploration of why C.K.’s behavior was kept on the down-low for so many years: The bigger “open secrets” than his transgressions seem to be that a) the industry is still rife with toxic behavior, and b) women who call it out usually suffer career-ending (or at least damaging) backlash. Koester sums it up succinctly in the doc: “Most female comedians quit, because it’s just a series of indignities they have to suffer all their lives to just get 50% of what men get.”

One happy exception is Tig Notaro, who, the film notes, gave a blatant middle finger to C.K., who was one of the executive producers of her show “One Mississippi.” (She didn’t participate in the doc either, though; the film uses archival footage.) The series’ second season featured a scene in which a man (Timm Sharp) masturbates in front of a horrified female employee (Stephanie Allyne, Notaro’s real-life wife), a glaring re-creation of what C.K. admitted doing to multiple women.

Notaro told the Hollywood Reporter at the time that she’d wanted to make clear the act was a violation and not the harmless kink that many C.K. defenders painted his actions as. “When people haven’t lived through that or experienced it in any way, for some reason this particular act is really tossed aside as though it’s just this person exposing themselves and they’re ‘just a weirdo’ and just ‘leave the room.’ … We wanted to show that you can be assaulted without even being touched.”

Meanwhile in the world of very famous male comics, Dave Chappelle took aim at Schachner in a standup special, saying she had a “brittle-ass spirit.” How can there be anything resembling a reckoning in this industry when this is the kind of reception victims get for going public? Bringing actual equity and accountability to standup should not require individual women to sacrifice themselves to bring attention to a specific abuser. And it also should not be dependent on what’s trending culturally. This is a systemic problem.

Writer and comedian Olivia Cathcart made this case back in 2020, writing in Paste Magazine that it “isn’t a matter of separating the art from the artist, it’s a matter of separating a threat from the workplace. Comedy is a job. Clubs and shows are a place of employment. By continuing to employ a known abuser, you are putting every coworker and patron in danger. You are saying a man’s access to stage time is more important than a woman’s (or girl’s) safety. This is a tangible attack on comedians more than any discussion about offensive jokes could be.”

I have twice seen comedian Maria Bamford do a darkly winky bit onstage about this, remarking that comedy club marquees are a reliable place to spot predators. As a comic who also does quite a bit of material on being open about money and earning power, Bamford is highlighting a key aspect of the endemic sexism here: Women are being robbed of the right to make money in comedy because club owners, promoters and publicists keep putting sh**ty men in comedy lineups.

The UK’s comedy community has, in recent years, featured more open scrutiny than here in the US — much of it in the wake of last fall’s multiple allegations against Russell Brand, whose alleged pernicious behavior appears to have been a noxious and enduring open secret in the British comedy world (Brand has denied all of the accusations, and has since pivoted to being an alt-right mouthpiece and, in the last few months, a born-again Christian).

“There are dozens of Russell Brands,” was the headline of one Guardian piece on female comics. Three years before the Brand scandal, another piece in that publication noted that “according to female performers, producers, agents and promoters in comedy … there is a deeply rooted sexism in the comedy scene that undermines the confidence and humanity of women, emboldens sexual predators and prevents people from speaking out.”

Here in the US, it’s unusual to find even that level of openness about gross behavior from male comics and the industry that buoys them. The Hollywood Reporter did have one panel of female comics “debating” the merits of Louis C.K.’s comeback, but it fell pretty far short of being an indictment of widespread behavior (or of him, for that matter).

And what’s so disheartening is to see, every so often, a spate of articles on this problem — as there were in 2016, with the advent of #MeToo and after the C.K. news, and then again in 2023 after the Brand story — and then to watch this documentary and realize not all that much has changed.

I want a world where female comics have a workplace where they feel they’ll be supported — and, more importantly, employed — if they speak out about abuse. A world in which they can say “F**k that guy” in interviews, on social media and especially on stage — and where they get a standing ovation.

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