TV Review: So did the fat lady

After a year hiatus, “Louie” returns stronger than ever

Over the course of its run, “Louie,”—written, directed and edited entirely by Louis CK —has evolved from what at first was a crude extension of CK’s stand-up routine into something more profound. The show began to challenge audience expectations by upending convention in unassuming yet radical ways; formula went out the window, narrative consistency was deliberately broken, eliciting laughs took a backseat to provoking thought, and the semi-autobiography became a sort of meta-drama, a vehicle for CK to occasionally publicly address various real-life conflicts (see: the Dane Cook and Marc Maron episodes, where Louie resolves actual public feuds with fellow comics through scripted confrontations).

Some of season three’s strongest episodes didn’t contain a single laugh-out-loud moment, but they possessed enough thematic heft and cinematic verve to make them seem more at home in an arthouse next to the latest Jarmusch offering than on a small screen following “The League.” CK dispensed with the more obvious “life of a comic” tropes that drove the earliest episodes (such as season one’s “The Heckler”) in favor of something more naked and raw—in episodes like “Dad” and “New Year’s Eve,” Louie seemed to reach deep inside himself and paint the screen with his guts. The uncertainties of fatherhood, the humiliation of searching for love, the shame of his sexual habits, the terror of dying alone—he threw a kitchen sink full of neuroses at viewers, to moving and profound effect.

The show recently began its fourth season on FX (Mondays, 9 p.m.) after a year hiatus. In the third episode of this season (which aired May 12), entitled “So Did the Fat Lady,” CK continues to expose every unflattering part of his being. This time, he aims his razor-sharp insight at an especially thorny subject: the hypocrisy of how overweight men view and treat overweight women.

The episode opens with Louie performing at the Comedy Cellar, riffing on the ways in which women are better than men. After he’s finished his routine and left the stage, Vanessa (Sarah Baker), a new waitress, strikes up a conversation with him. She’s funny and charming, and the rapport is instant, but she’s overweight. She quickly asks him out, but Louie feigns exhaustion and turns her down, despite the palpable chemistry. Later, after she has once more bugged him for a date, he takes pity and agrees to a friendly hangout over coffee. They wander through New York City, cracking jokes and sharing their frustrations with being single in the city.

“Try being a fat girl in her thirties,” Vanessa says at one point, to which Louie responds, “Oh, come on. You’re not fat.”

His response prompts an epic monologue from Vanessa that’s already been canonized on the Internet as perhaps the single greatest scene in the entire series thus far. She first scolds Louie, telling him, “The meanest thing you can say to a fat girl is ‘you’re not fat.’”

Then, with passion and dignity, she lays bare the disparity between herself and Louie, and by extension overweight women and overweight men.

“You can talk into the microphone and say you can’t get a date, you’re overweight. It’s adorable. But if I say it, they call the suicide hotline on me… You know, if you were standing over there looking at us, you know what you’d see? That we totally match. We’re actually a great couple together. And yet, you would never date a girl like me.”

The speech, delivered pitch-perfectly by Baker, doesn’t ask for pity. But it does by implication scold Louie (who, in just the previous episode, bedded a model) for being party to a societal hypocrisy that demands physical perfection from women while conditioning even the dumpiest of men to shun their female counterparts who fall short of perfection. The scene is beautifully written and executed, and manages to end on a note of melancholy warmth.

Louis CK is currently the biggest and arguably most important working comic in the world. He’s ascended the ranks of comedy by walking a tightrope between misanthropic self-loathing and an aching empathy for human folly. In his stand-up act, the schlubby, befuddled everyman delivers incisive takedowns of our narcissistic, technology-obsessed culture, but he tempers his vitriol with compassion and optimism. Unlike say, David Cross, CK’s act never slips into holier-than-thou sneering because he never gives himself a pass; self-deprecation is his secret weapon. With “So Did the Fat Lady,” he’s outdone himself.