S2E11: Louie took on a touchy, difficult subject this week: young teenagers. When Louie’s sister drops his niece on him at Grand Central Station without so much as a warning, Louie is forced to try to keep up and while the sullen young girl is just about as stereotypical and obnoxious as possible, she actually ends up opening his eyes to a few things. Imagine that.
“I don’t know anybody her age.” –Louie
After we watch a Louis CK set wherein he complains about the audacity of young teens and 20-somethings, the episode opens with a black and white montage set to squirrely jazz music as the different New York characters navigate Grand Central Station. It’s these little artful moments that really make this show for me. It could be just Louie going through his often depressing yet hilarious stories, but we get this extra, interesting element. It’s the mark of television made with care, rather than television cut and manufactured quickly and with the biggest bang for its buck.
We settle on Louie who’s meeting his niece and his sister. His sister shows up and frantically talks about how she has to go to Philadelphia. She’s just dropped her 13 year old, Amy, on Louie and he’s forced to deal with her. She immediately begins running ahead, leaving Louie trailing helplessly behind. She’s a particularly hideous breed of 13 year old – the typical kind. She holes herself up in his daughters’ room and when he opens the door to check on her, she’s sitting there like a vampire. It’s a little over the top, but it works – 13 year olds are scary people. She asks him to take her to Fontana’s – a venue on the Lower East Side. Somehow, she gets in and seeing Louie against the impossibly cool background of Lower East Side hipsters with his emotionless niece is simultaneously maddening and hilarious.
“My mom screams f**k all the time …in my face.” -Amy
When they leave, she demands they go to a comedy show. She suddenly shows an interest in something and wants to see Louie perform. Sure, let’s not worry about the fact that she’s 13 and she couldn’t get in to any of these places. When they get there, Godfrey is performing and doing “crowd work” – basically when comedians pick out things about the crowd and make one-off jokes about them. She thinks it’s funny, but Louie, being the comedian’s comedian tries and fails to explain that there’s a difference between that “lazy” kind of comedy and his comedy. Somehow, this comment by a 13 year old screws up his set and he starts trying and failing to do some “crowd work.” He may be one of the most successful comedians right now, but he’s still willing to let some old woman heckle him like he’s nobody on his show. Louis CK’s fierce humility is pretty astounding sometimes.
“How’d you get her to talk to you?” –Louie
“…It’s called empathy, man.” –Godfrey
He takes her to get food with other comedians, again this includes Todd Barry. The guys all try to talk to her, but it’s like talking to a brick wall. Then Godfrey shows up and suddenly she’s willing to talk. I personally thought it might be because he’s younger and more hip, but when Louie asks him about it, Godfrey says he has experience talking to younger kids and that Louie just needs to learn how to talk to people who are different than he is. Well, okay. Some of that is true. But let’s look at this objectively – she wasn’t exactly making it easy. In any case, immediately after Louie was bashing Godfrey’s comedic techniques, the comedian comes in and puts his personable skills to shame. It’s an interesting notion that we all encounter; we disapprove of the way someone runs their life or work and we assume that means we can disapprove of them across the board. That’s how it works in a sitcom, but in real life, they’ve likely got many qualities that put some of ours to shame. Multi-dimensional people on a half hour sitcom? Yes, they exist when we’re looking at Louie.
Finally, on the way home Louie gives a homeless man a dollar and Amy tells him he shouldn’t do that because it’s condescending and that her father said people only do charity work to better themselves. Louie, frustrated, has an outburst and yells at her that her dad ran out on her. Good going, Louie. Clearly, he’s got a lot to learn about how to talk to a 13 year old and when he gets home he finds that he’s going to have a lot more time to do that learning. He gets a call from Philadelphia; his sister is in the hospital. She was caught in a public fountain “acting irrationally.” The woman says he should retain custody of Amy until her mother is well. We’re just about as thrilled as Louie is about this, but on some level, the time away from her mother will be good for Amy and the time Louie’s forced to spend with his niece might help with a bit of that empathy Godfrey was talking about.
I never thought an episode of Louie would teach us how to see a 13 year old’s emotions as something valid and worthy of our empathy, but here we are. It helps that he gives her a mother who’s crazy enough to drop her at Grand Central and go bathing in Philadelphia fountains, but still.
