Today, Explained - Don't call it a comeback

Episode Date: August 30, 2018

Louis CK surprised New York City's Comedy Cellar with a fresh set of jokes Sunday night. Some were not amused. Vox's Constance Grady explains how to apologize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Who's coming back? Well, what we're seeing right now is kind of like a second wave of men who've been accused of sexual misconduct sort of putting out feelers about coming back. We're seeing Matt Lauer, who was approached by some fans and who told them that he's very busy being a dad right now, but he expects to be back on television very soon. Matt Lauer was fired from NBC a few months ago for allegedly sexually harassing quite a few of his employees. And we're also seeing Louis C.K., who actually admitted to masturbating in front of a lot of young up-and-coming comedians. He just did his first performance in several months at the Comedy Cellar in New York. You mentioned that this is sort of the second wave of rumors sort of swirling around that some of these men are trying to come back or trying to restart TV shows or get back in the public eye.

How are we to know if it's for real or just that, just sort of a rumor? Well, historically, what we've seen with men who are accused of doing really terrible things in Hollywood is that if they keep going long enough, it'll work out for them. So the big example there, of course, is Mel Gibson. They may take our lives, but they'll never take us! You are provocatively dressed all the time with your fake boobs. You feel you have to show off. Mel Gibson was caught on tape in 2006. He was pulled over for a DUI

and went into this long anti-Semitic rant in which he said that Jews were responsible for all the wars in the world. A few years later, in I think 2010, he was caught again on tape. You were hitting a woman with a child in her hands. You, what kind of man is that? Hitting a woman when she woman with a child in her hands. You, what kind of man is that? Hitting a woman when she's holding a child in her hand, breaking her teeth twice in the face.

What kind of man is that? No, you're all angry now. You're gonna get to it. You know what? You're gonna answer. One day, boy, you're gonna answer. Hugely prominent celebrities were calling for a Mel Gibson boycott. His agency dropped him. All of his studios were refusing to work with him. And then Mel Gibson was nominated for Best Director for Hacksaw Ridge. If his case proves anything, it's that as long as you are willing to just keep pushing at the door for multiple years, in his case, it took about 10 years, you can probably eventually claw your way back up to the A-list. 10 years have gone by. I'm feeling good.

I'm much better. I'm sober, all that kind of stuff. And for me, it's a dim thing in the past. But others bring it up, which kind of I find annoying because I don't understand why after 10 years it's any kind of issue. Surely, if I was really what they say I was, some kind of hater, you know, there'd be evidence of actions. Okay, so that's what Mel Gibson did.

Is Louis C.K. trying to pull a similar thing off? He did this set at the Comedy Cellar in New York on Sunday. How did he acknowledge all the unsolicited masturbating he did in front of women? He did not say anything about the Me Too allegations. He did make a joke about rape whistles, which seems to have gotten some mixed reactions. Apparently, he did a little setup on how he was clean as a whistle that ended on the punchline that rape whistles are not clean. Aye yi yi, Louis. Were people there for Louis?

So he came in as a surprise guest. No one knew he was coming. The owner of the comedy cellar had said he did not know that Louis C.K. was coming beforehand. Apparently, according to people who were in the room, there was this hugely warm standing ovation. As soon as he came in, people were yelling, you know, it's good to have you back. Some of the women who were in the room have said that they saw some other women just sitting very stone-faced and not saying anything, but that the atmosphere in the room was such that no one was going to heckle this guy. One woman said that it sort of felt like if you were to boo Louis C.K., you yourself would

get heckled out of the room. Is it weird that he chose to surprise people with a comedy set? Like, I don't want to go to a movie theater and see a surprise Woody Allen movie right now. Yeah. So in this instance, he's going into this venue, which actually has pretty strict rules about when you're allowed to leave. At the Comedy Cellar, you have to prove that you've met your drink minimum and that you've spent enough money basically before they'll let you out. So he kind of has a captive audience who had no idea he was coming and are now stuck essentially lending their support by default to this act that they may or may not want to witness. How is it different for someone like Louis C.K., who's a social satirist, who appears to be pretty feminist in his work?

How do women still go out with guys when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We're the number one threat to women. Globally and historically, we're the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We're the worst thing that ever happens to them. That's true. How is it different for him to stage some sort of reentry into the comedy world than, say, Mel Gibson, who's best known for directing and starring in a movie about impaling people in battle. Yeah, I think that Louis C.K. actually has an opening here that he apparently did not take of really addressing the things that he has admitted to doing.

You know, his whole persona is built on confessional comedy. If I'm in a gas station late at night and a young man comes in wearing a hooded sweatshirt, if he's white, I'll think, oh, he's an athlete. If he's black, unless he has a big smile on his face, then I become mildly racist. And this is what I think. I think, that's fine. Everything's fine. Nothing's going to happen. No, of course I'm fine. Why did I even think that for a second? It's about saying, okay, I had this terrible, terrible impulse. I'm a terrible person and I'm going to try to be better. That's kind of at the root of his whole persona. But as far as we can tell in his set on Sunday night, He just did not take that opportunity. He did not address any of

the things that he has done in the past. And that, I think, creates a sense of real betrayal with feminist fans of him. I think Mel Gibson was a movie star, and there's sort of a glamour and reserve from that. He was aspirational. Louis C.K. is relatable. And as such, you sort of feel like he owes you more, and when he doesn't live up to that relationship, it can be really hard for fans of the show to deal with. Another comedian who got caught up in this Me Too movement in a very different way, who came back with a set of new material this week, was Aziz Ansari. Now, his case is so different because the allegations themselves were pretty divisive.

What's the guy like Aziz to do? So the Aziz Ansari thing is very, very tricky. Aziz Ansari was accused essentially of coercing a date of his into performing acts that she was not comfortable with. It's a situation where the consent seems kind of dubious, but it's not clear cut that what he did to her was, you know, assault or harassment or anything necessarily illegal. But there's enough gray area there that Aziz Ansari is not necessarily someone who will find himself needing to apologize to his fan base in the way that someone like Louis C.K. would need to do. If a guy like Louis C.K. is allowed to use the same power structures that kept him from ever really addressing these accusations that he ended up admitting were true until the New York Times was running a story about it, allow him to come in and do a surprise set at the Comedy Cellar months

later when nothing's really changed. Is that a failure of the Me Too movement on some level? Did something change? So I think this is a conversation we're seeing more and more as Me Too enters into its sort of second phase. Right after Harvey Weinstein, there was this enormous focus on getting rid of individual bad actors. And now the heat from that movement has sort of died away. And we're seeing more and more discussions about the systems in which those bad actors were allowed to flourish.

I think at this stage, it's pretty early in this movement for a major systemic change to have occurred, and policy ideas that could potentially address some of these issues. I think we're seeing a lot of discussion about getting rid of nondisclosure agreements in cases. consolidated his power was that when he harassed or assaulted women, he would pay them off and they would sign a non-disclosure agreement and then they weren't able to come forward afterwards. So we're starting to see discussions about how to get rid of these systems of power that have been complicit in keeping these individual bad actors in charge. But it's hard to say that that work is anywhere close to done. It's really just beginning right now. There is a way to do this right. One of these Me Too guys actually aced the test. He's next on Today Explained. Sure. Right now you can get $10 off your first purchase of an audiobook at g.co slash play slash explained.

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The Verge Cast. It's the flagship podcast of The Verge, covering culture through the lens of consumer technology. Every Friday, the team over there unpacks the most important, talked about stories in technology and explains why they matter. And the show's also dropping interview episodes on Tuesdays now. With some of the most prominent figures in technology and online culture, this week's episode features a deeply nerdy policy conversation with Microsoft's President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith.

You can find The Verge cast wherever you find your podcasts. Constance, how do you apologize? That is such a good question. I think there are three major segments to an effective apology. First of all, you have to admit what you've done, which Louis C.K. has done, we should say. Second of all, you have to say that you know what you did was wrong and you know how it hurt the other person.

Third of all, you have to show what steps you are taking to keep yourself from ever doing something like that again and do something that will help the person that you hurt in the first place. And so Louis C.K.'s kind of fallen down on the second and third of those, huh? Yeah, he's pretty much said that he did a bad thing and he knows it was bad, but he hasn't really shown that he knows why it was bad and he hasn't really done much to show us that he won't do it in the future

and he's helping the people that he hurt. In all of the Me Too business from the past almost year now, has anyone come out and apologized for their actions in a way that adheres to sort of the three guiding principles you just proposed? I think the closest we've seen to that is Dan Harmon. Dan Harmon was the showrunner for Community and Rick and Morty, and he sexually harassed one of his writers. The most clinical way I can put it in fessing up to my crimes is that I was attracted to a writer that I had power over because I was a showrunner. And after she came forward with her accusation, he went on to his podcast Harmontown.

And for about seven minutes, he went into this long apology where he explained that he understood why what he had done was wrong. I crushed on her and resented her for not reciprocating it. And the entire time I was the one writing her paychecks and in control of whether she stayed or went and whether she felt good about herself or not and just treated her cruelly, pointedly. Things that I would never, ever, ever have done

if she had been male. And that even though he understood himself as having been, I think he says, in love with her, she was not in a position where she could meaningfully reciprocate or consent to whatever he suggested to her. He talked about how he understood how his actions had damaged her writing career and her personal life. And he talked about all of the things he wanted to do to make sure that he wouldn't do something like that in the future. I never did it before and I will never do it again, but I certainly wouldn't have been able to do it if I had any respect for women. On a fundamental level, I was thinking about them as different creatures. And I did it all by not

thinking about it. And I got away with it by not thinking about it. And if she hadn't mentioned something on Twitter, I would have continued to not have to think about it. So after Dan Harmon makes this apology on his podcast, Megan Ganz calls it a masterclass in how to apologize. And she very publicly grants him forgiveness for what he did to her. The last and most important thing I can say is just think about it. No matter who you are at work, no matter where you're working work no matter where you're working no matter what field you're in no matter what position you have over or under or side by side with somebody just think about it because if you don't think about it you're going to get away with not

thinking about it and you can cause a lot of damage that is technically legal and hurts everybody. And I think that we're living in a good time right now because we're not going to get away with it anymore. And if we can make it a normal part of our culture that we think about it and possibly talk about it, then maybe we can get to a better place where that stuff doesn't happen. When we talk about people like Mel Gibson or Louis C.K. or Dan Harmon, these are people who just aren't going to go hungry either way. Their livelihoods aren't at stake here. It seems like it's just their legacies on the line. What about the accusers?

What about the women who have come forward? Most of the women in question who have made these accusations publicly under their own names have locked down their social media. They've been not making public appearances. They are not showing up at the comedy cellar to standing ovations. A lot of them have spoken about receiving death threats and targeted abuse on their social media platforms. Part of the reason that we talk about Me Too as a workplace issue, right, is that the harassment these women were receiving was in their place of work. It made it difficult for them to feel safe at work. It hampered their

career progression. This is another way that they're being victimized by what happened to them. And they're not in any position to make a comeback right now. You talk about women who aren't even really well-known entities having their careers being destroyed by this. Are there any examples of men who have had their careers destroyed by sexually harassing women over and over again, other than like these really extreme cases like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein? It is certainly the exception rather than the rule. I can't think of any men whose careers have been ruined by accusations of sexual harassment.

You know, Roman Polanski was convicted of statutory rape and he won an Oscar 20 years later. And the Oscar goes to Roman Polanski for The Pianist. He can't come back to the country because he fled before he was sentenced. The Academy congratulates Roman Polanski and accepts this award on his behalf. But other than that, he's pretty much doing fine. The only instances that I can think of in which men's careers have really been permanently dismantled by the accusations against them have involved criminal charges.

And I think the Polanski case shows that even then, it's not a sure thing. Constance Grady writes about culture for Vox. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. This is Today Explained. One last thank you to Google Play for supporting the show today. Thank you.