Hannah Gadsby is definitely not shy when it comes to calling out imbalances and injustices in the entertainment world post #MeToo, particularly when it comes to her comments about disgraced comedian Louis CK.
After calling CK “a joke” and criticising him over his inability to reassess his position of power following his admission of sexual misconduct in 2017, Gadsby has now said he can still find redemption, the problem is that he refuses to do so.
Speaking to Indiewire, Gadsby says CK has a “clear path to redemption” but he’s “just not taking it,” opting instead to be “self-indulgent” and a “cry baby” about the whole thing.
She remarked that his recent slew of stand-up comedy shows aren’t a path of redemption and show nothing more than him “throwing a tantrum for the tantrum itself.”
Gadsby definitely is onto something here about CK. After being put in a naughty corner for about a year to think about what he’d done, CK started performing stand-up again in 2018.
But rather than learning a big lesson on why jerking off in front of women without their consent is wrong and working those learnings into his material in a thoughtful way (like Aziz Ansari), CK is doing the same offensive jokes about women and masturbation he did prior to his sexual misconduct admission, as well as some new ones about shooting survivors and transgender people because why the hell not.
Not only does this tell us that he’s learned nothing, he actually thinks he’s the victim in this whole thing.
When asked whether other disgraced comedians aside from CK can find redemption, Gadsby says it’s applicable to “anyone” as “there’s an issue at large, at it goes across all issues of representation.”
CK and many other disgraced comedians have a lot of work to do if they want to redeem themselves. But if they take the CK “cry baby” route, then that path to redemption is going to be a never ending road to nowhere and you can be sure that Hannah Gadsby will call them out on it again and again.