This interview first appeared in edited form in Pittsburgh City Pape September 6th 2007
Louis CK grew up without a lot of money, but even when he got some of his own he wasn’t very responsible with it. “Money’s like oxygen. It’s not my money; it’s the money. It’s just an element of the universe, so I always feel like hoarding it in one place is unnatural.” But with a wife and kids, Louis’s become more conservative, though his recently concluded HBO sitcom helped a great deal financially. “Lucky Louie got me out of a hole that took 38 years to dig. A sweet nothing is what I have now.” If you missed Lucky Louie or either of Louis’s two HBO specials, you can get your CK fix on Thu., Sept. 6, at the Rex Theatre.
If you had done a sitcom prior to having your children, what do you think that sitcom would have been about?
I actually wrote a pilot every year for a different network the last few years, but they didn’t get on the air. I wrote one before I got married with Spike Feresten, who’s got his own talk show now. He wrote for Seinfeld, and we had a development deal together to do a show for me. So anyway, it was called Boom Town, and it was just about me living in New York with my friends and having little money and just being a jackoff. It was just kind of a young guy making observations about life and getting frustrated with stuff. There wasn’t much to it, and that’s probably why it didn’t get on the air. Then I did one called Brooklyn USA, which was about me moving to Brooklyn with my wife, who was pregnant at the time. That was also autobiographical, and that got a little closer. I wrote that for FOX, and they liked it, but they didn’t shoot the pilot. And then I had a kid, and I did a pilot called Saint Louie for CBS. For that one we shot the pilot, but it didn’t get on the air, and Lucky Louie came after that.
What were the pilots before Boom Town like?
They were definitely autobiographical. Not so much things that had happened in my life, but from my point of view. And if you watch any stuff from my earlier acts, like my Comedy Central special, it was that material, basically. I think I had the whole thing about the bank and not having enough money as a central theme to that one, which I ended up using in Lucky Louie. It was just me trying to get along in the world without a huge amount of coping skills.
How long is it that you lived with not that much money in the bank?
Pretty much my whole life. I grew up without a lot of money. Then I’ve never been good with it, and never respected it much, and so I’ve always been a little bit in debt. I guess to me, money that you have is potential. I just want to use it. I don’t want to keep it around. I also feel like money is like oxygen. It’s not my money, it’s “the” money. It’s just an element of the universe, so I always feel like hoarding it in one place is unnatural. But that’s changing because I’ve got kids now, so I’m trying to save. I think I’m in the black for the first time ever right now. Basically Lucky Louie dug me out of a big hole. It took me thirty-eight years to dig the hole, and Lucky Louie got me out. And now I’m basically out. A sweet nothing is what I have now.
Did you pick up any skills to survive on very little funds?
Yeah. I picked those up when I was a kid because we never had any snacks in the house. We had crackers — my mother would buy these awful crackers that didn’t even have salt on them, and I used to ask her to buy the pinwheel cookies, and she’d say, “If I buy those cookies, they’ll be gone by the end of the day. These crackers will last two weeks.” Which was such bizarre logic to me. Yeah, if you buy petrified shit, that’s going to last forever. Is that the idea of food, that it doesn’t get eaten fast? Well, it is if you’re a mother on a budget. Anyway, I didn’t have snacks to sit at home and satisfy my kid cravings with, so I had to go out and find weird shit to do, and I didn’t have a lot of toys, so I guess it spawned some kind of creativity. It also made me steal things a lot, from stores and from my rich friends’ houses, and I’d get in a lot of trouble. I learned to lie a lot, that’s a sort of survival skill when you don’t have a lot of money. But rich people do that too.
Have you ever been caught shoplifting?
Not shoplifting, no. I did get arrested once with my friends because we were stealing money out of cars that weren’t locked. It’s about as petty and disgusting a crime as you can do when you’re a bunch of pothead kids. We would find a car that’s not locked, and we would rummage for change in the ashtray. And a couple of cops caught us, and we actually spent the night in jail. I was about thirteen. That was my little getting caught stealing thing. But I never got for all the giant candy bars and zippo lighters I stole from the CVS down the street. Perfect crimes.
When the cops caught you, did you try to lie your way out of it?
Oh, sure. We said that we weren’t doing it., but the cops saw us. We told our parents that it was a huge mistake, and they believed us, bizarrely. We had to go to court, and we thought, “What have they got on us?” We thought there would be some detectives there and a prosecutor, and the point of it was to prove whether we did it or not. But of course the point of the court was, “Of course they did it, but what do we do to these dumb kids?” We got lectured by a judge, and our parents were furious. It was awful. There’s no trouble I’ve never been in that I didn’t try to lie my way out of. When I was a kid, anyway. As a grown up I tend to just face it.
When it came to lying as a kid, did you ever start to believe the lies yourself?
Sure, I remember I used to tell people fantasy stuff, and after a while it just became part of my past. Kind of like Ronald Reagan thinking that he fought in World War II.
When it comes to raising your own children, what sort of disciplinary action do you take if your kids are caught lying?
Well, I have a five year old and a two year old, so they don’t have those kind of layers yet in their understanding of life. We all just go with reality. They don’t really lie yet. I don’t know that I’ll so much discipline them as try to relate to them, because I know what it’s like. I know how unbelievably tempting it is, because lying is literally a way of changing the world that you live in. So for a kid, it’s an undeniable temptation. Especially as a kid living under any stress. I think I’d be more likely to say, “Listen, I know how cool it is. I know why you lie. Please don’t, it’s for your own good. It’s very hard to stop.”
When it comes to raising your own kids, because you’re able to provide them with things that your parents weren’t able to provide you with, do you find yourself enjoying things like snacks, toys, and trips as much as, maybe even more than, your own children?
I’m definitely still amazed that I am a grown-up and that I can go buy candy. Just now, I went to a confectionary store and bought an assortment of chocolates. I ate about eight of them and I feel like a bag of shit. It all leads to misery. Either you’re miserable because you don’t have the candy you want, or you’re miserable because you ate the candy.
You live in Upstate New York now. Is it a rural sort of area?
It’s pretty rural. There are more and more second homebuyers up here. Most people who do that buy something in the Hamptons. This is just Columbia County, just this sort of dead area. But mostly it’s agricultural. You actually have to farm if you have a certain amount of land; you have to farm some of it. But I love it up here. It’s great. I go a little crazy. I’m definitely a creature of the city. But in doses, it’s great.
Do you have to farm your own land?
We have six acres, so we don’t have to farm that. But there’s a farm right across the street from us, so we generally hear the mooing of cows pretty much through the day. We take the kids down there. They have a little pond on this farm, and they visit the cows, and there are pigs, and wild turkeys that they know pretty well.
Since you’re living in a rural area, do you do any hunting?
No, I never have. I don’t own a gun or anything. It’s just not my style. I don’t think I would ever hunt. My neighbors do. They hunt on my land sometimes. They’re really nice about it. I have neighbors that bow hunt with a crossbow, because you can do that all year. There’s a very short season for deer hunting up here, but bow hunting I think is year round. I was sort of bummed out by it when I first moved here, but I really could care less. I hate the deer around here. I hope they all die.
What do they do to anger you so much?
They shit everywhere, and they have ticks that give you Lyme disease. My wife and my dog both got Lyme disease. It’s a horrible sickness. And they’re also not nice animals. They make awful noises, and they scare my dog all day and night. They’re a pestilence. I really don’t give them any more value than a rat, and the only reason that anybody ever does is because they are larger than a rat, and they don’t live most people. If you live around deer, you don’t think they’re very special anymore.
Living in this more nature-like environment, has this changed your opinion on different aspects of nature?
Most definitely. My neighbor the farmer invited me to watch him killing his Christmas turkeys one year, and I brought my video camera and videotaped it, and it was fascinating to watch him hang these turkeys by their feet and just slice their heads off with a knife, and then dip them in boiling cauldrons and wipe their feathers off and clean them. In less than an hour they went from being walking and talking turkeys to market turkeys. You could put a sticker on them. And I realized that this guy does this all day, every day. It’s a cycle of animals and food. It made me realize that people’s attitudes about wildlife and animals and food are subject to their experience.
What other experiences like that have you had there?
There’s all kinds of cycles up here that don’t exist in the cities. Columbia County fair has a demolition derby, and what happens is as the summer wears on, guys who live up here will start collecting shit cars that are just barely running. What you do is you buy a car for like five hundred dollars, like an old Buick Le Sabre, and you pull out the seats (except for the driver’s seat), and you knock the glass out, and you take out the grill and everything, and you make it into a derby car. And you paint it all kinds of crazy colors. And as the fall approaches, people display their derby cars on their front lawns. Then, on demolition derby night, they drive them to the county fair and smash them into each other. It’s spectacular. You’ve never seen anything like it; it’s so great. And then all those derby cars are just junk. They’re just mush, and they get taken to the dump. And so there’s this cycle of old vehicles that nobody wants anymore becoming these great pieces of entertainment for everybody in town.
Are you going to participate in the demolition derby one year?
I really want to, but I’m never here for long enough. I’m was in LA for a while for Lucky Louie, and this year I’m on the road constantly, so I keep missing out on it. But if I ever spent a whole year here, I’d probably do the demolition derby, and then I’d probably kill myself, because I just don’t think I could stay up here for that long.
Outside of all the touring that you’re doing, what else are you working on right now?
I’m writing a lot of things, but stuff that you’re writing is always just sort of pipe dreams. I’ve got a whole bunch of different TV and movie projects that I want to do. There’s usually a ten to one ratio of stuff that you write and dream up and stuff that you actually get off the ground. So I’ve got about ten things going right now, and if history bears out, one of them will be on TV or the screen next year or something. But for now I’m really concentrating on being a comedian, because if you really take it seriously, it’s really a full time job. I’m writing a brand new hour of stand-up, and that’s what I’m performing on this tour that actually really starts in Pittsburgh. I’ve been doing the clubs all summer to bang the material together. It’s all stuff that’s brand new since my last HBO special, Shameless. I spent this summer doing it in clubs and now the material’s ready, and I’m going to spend a year in the theaters putting a theatrical polish on it. And in January of next year, I’ll shoot another special.
And that will also be for HBO?
That’s right.
How do you feel about touring with Todd Barry?
I’m really really lucky that Todd is coming with me. He is a guy who could headline the rooms that I’m working. But I’m the one who’s got the tour right now, and I convinced him to come with me. He’s the perfect opening act because he just gets the crowd really focused. He starts with nothing, they’re just sitting there, and he gets them to a great place. And, he’s one of my oldest friends, so I get to have lunch with him when we’re on tour together, and hang out. I’ve been doing comedy for twenty-two years, so I really have met enough comedians. I don’t really want to meet anymore. God bless all of them, and I wish them all the greatest health and luck, but after twnty-two years, it’s a relief to hang out with people you know.
What is something about Todd Barry that Todd Barry wouldn’t want you to share with the readers?
Todd loves me and thinks I’m a great comedian. He loves me like a brother, and he admires what I do on stage.
Do you think Todd should get out of the business?
Oh, no. I think Todd is a genius, and I think he should do stand-up comedy until long after he’s dead.
