What can a new documentary tell us about the Louis CK scandal?

In November 2017, the New York Times published an article confirming what had long been an open secret within the world of US comedy: that Louis CK, the heralded stand-up and star of the eponymous, critically beloved FX show Louie, had sexually harassed numerous female comedians. Specifically, that CK had exposed himself and masturbated in front of several women (or asked to do so), and that his agent knew about it. CK admitted as much – “these stories are true”, he said in a half conciliatory statement.

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Sorry/Not Sorry, a new documentary which premiered at this year’s Toronto film festival, examines both CK’s conduct and cultural reputation as a truth-telling comedy-philosopher of our worst impulses, as well as the backlash – or lack thereof – to his behavior. On the heels of the Times’s bombshell expose on Harvey Weinstein (the CK article was published a month later) and the nascent #MeToo movement, reaction to the women’s stories was initially swift. Netflix, FX and HBO severed ties with him; the distributor of I Love You, Daddy, the film CK wrote, directed and starred in – and which featured a character pretending to masturbate in front of others – cancelled its premiere. In a note to fans, CK promised to take some time to listen and learn.

Within nine months, he was back on stage at New York’s venerated Comedy Cellar, igniting questions of how to rehabilitate the disgraced, what counts as repentance, what to do with problematic artists, what has or has not changed. Sorry/Not Sorry, directed by Caroline Suh and Cara Mones, makes clear what many already know: that cancellation does not really exist. Louis CK may no longer be on The Tonight Show or gracing magazine covers, but there has never been a mechanism to keep away a willing audience, which he still has in spades.

The nearly 90-minute film partially takes its title from CK’s 2021 special Sorry, which treats his past behavior with a shrug and a middle finger, at worst an accidentally revealed kink. In 2022, CK won a Grammy award for best comedy special for Sincerely Louis CK. He has continued to make and directly distribute comedy to fans via his website. Earlier this year, he sold out Madison Square Garden.

None of this is new information; Sorry/Not Sorry, produced in part by the New York Times, brings up several thorny questions but treads little new ground. Nor does it argue that CK, who declined to participate in the film, should stop performing comedy. Instead, through a synthesis of talking heads, footage of CK’s performances, old headlines and interviews with women who came forward or reported on his misconduct, the film conveys a missed opportunity on CK’s part for contrition, and for the comedy world at large to speak up in the first place, or change at all.

Sorry/Not Sorry primarily hinges on the accounts of three women who spoke up: comedian Jen Kirkman, one of the first women to publicly (and anonymously) denounce CK’s behavior, and comedy’s sanctioning of it, on her podcast in 2015; the performer and artist Abby Schachner, who told her story of CK masturbating while on the phone with her and was later mocked by Dave Chappelle as having a “brittle-ass spirit”; and the comedian and writer Megan Koester, one of the first people to report on CK’s behavior, earning her a verbal lashing from the founder of the Just For Laughs comedy festival in 2015.

All three relay the stories of CK’s behavior – firsthand experiences for Kirkman and Schachner; for Koester, frustration with the comedy scene’s reticence and complicity – with the clarity, wryness, and lack of sensationalism that CK’s defenders have lacked. “I just felt duped,” said Schachner. And later: “It does bother me that I’m not going to live this down. Like this is going to be in my fucking obituary. And it bothers me that this is my thing.”

Sorry/Not Sorry embeds these testimonies of frustration, revelation and aftermath within the context of CK’s career. Cultural critics such as the NYT’s Wesley Morris and Variety’s Alison Herman dispassionately explain CK’s rise to pre-eminence in black, self-referential comedy. The three Times journalists who broke the story – Melena Ryzik, Cara Buckley and Jodi Kantor (of She Said and Weinstein investigation fame) – briefly survey their reporting methods and the fog of rumors surrounding CK for years before publication, via a Gawker blind item and word of mouth. Buckley recalls her shock at seeing I Love You, Daddy, a film in which CK’s plays a man whose teenage daughter dates a 69-year-old artist accused of impropriety. “It almost seemed like a defiance for him to write these scenes,” she said of the film’s dismissal of sexual depredation and public masturbation scenes. In a sit-down interview with him, CK baldly denied any connection to his real life or the by-then rampant rumors.

Some figures in comedy also reflect on what they knew, and when, about CK’s behavior, and what should be required for a comeback. Mike Schur, the creator of such sitcoms as Parks and Recreation and The Good Place, recalls hiring CK, then a rising star, for a guest role early in Parks and Rec, and bringing him back years later after hearing a secondhand story of CK’s masturbating in front of comedians Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov in his hotel room at the Aspen Comedy Festival in 2002. “I pretended like I didn’t know” that he’d heard the same story several times. His attitude, he said, was “that’s not my problem”.

“The fact that I thought it wasn’t my problem is the problem. That’s exactly the problem, that everybody was treating this like it wasn’t there problem,” Schur says later in the film.

Sorry/Not Sorry, which was purchased by Greenwich Entertainment at Toronto, does not offer clear answers on handle a comeback like Louis CK’s, or how the culture should handle gradations of offense. But several participants agree that CK’s behavior post public disgrace has not been enough. Michael Ian Black, an actor and comedian who once tweeted about the possibility of giving CK a second chance, says the comedian’s material since disgrace, which has generally avoided or dismissed the elephant in the room, has been a “missed opportunity.” As Koester puts it: “He came back, he learned nothing. He didn’t say anything profound about the experience.”

The film’s ultimate focus returns to the women who spoke up, and have faced public scrutiny, harassment and association with CK ever since, and the comedy world that still, according to several, prizes fame over workplace safety and fairness. Did the comedy industry learn anything from the rise and fall and rise again of Louis CK? Has anything changed? There aren’t clear answers for that, either.