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HBO
How did the idea for "Lucky Louie" come about?
C.K.
I just wanted to do a funny show. And I got married, I had kids, I went crazy, and I started talking about it onstage. I felt a need to talk about it, and people seemed to connect. I would go up for roles for sitcoms but it always felt weird. I wanted to be able to act out these scenes that were happening to me in my life, experiences that were funny, and this was a way to do it. And with the live audience, it felt like — if I can just do what I do onstage doing stand-up, in scenes with other actors — I'll be comfortable.
HBO
So is the show drawn from your life?
C.K.
Initially it was — the being married and having kids part. It's a very profound way to live your life, 'cause the stakes go way up. And it made me wanna do this. So, yeah, it comes from that. But everybody that I've kinda brought along is bringing their own experience to it. All the writers on the show have added their own marriage and family experiences, acting out their frustrations and fears through our show. I'm just the one who talks. And Pamela Adlon, who plays my wife, her marriage and my marriage sort of collide horribly in this show.
HBO
How do you describe the show and the characters to people?
C.K.
Well, it's real simple. It's about a guy in a dead-end job who has a wife and a kid. He works in a muffler shop, but he's not even a mechanic. If you work at Dunkin' Donuts, you can just go over to Midas and retrain for two days, and you now are a muffler guy. So that's what this guy is. He's working in the service industry, and his wife is a nurse, so she's got an actual profession, an actual skill. And since her job has benefits and real pay, she's the one that works full-time. It happens in a lot of families. The guy's job has to be part-time, 'cause if he did it full-time it would only cost too much to put the kid in day care. So we're just in a common situation.
His wife can be a pain in the ass, he's a douchebag in her eyes. And it gets to feel numb after a while. His friends are stupid, but he can't go out looking for a great best friend, like in other sitcoms where the friend is just right there for the guy. I don't know, I never had a friend like that. So it's just regular folks.
HBO
So this is the first live audience sitcom of its kind for HBO — and it kind of borrows from the "old fashioned" sitcom formats. Can you talk about how it's different from anything people have seen on the networks?
C.K.
Well, what they're letting us do is be a little more realistic about things, and go after humor in places that other sitcoms can't. The networks need to stay clean and not offend anybody or piss off their sponsors, so they have a very tight target to hit. That makes it harder for them. Some shows do it great — "Seinfeld" was on network television, it's a great show. But we have it easier than "Seinfeld" did, because HBO kinda let us do whatever we wanted here.
To me, what's funny about people is that they're flawed. They can be jerks or they're silly or they're sad. Those things are funny to me, when people are miserable. But misery doesn't sell that well on network television. Here, it does pretty well.
HBO
Along those lines, having more rope, how do you know when you've gone too far — or is there such a thing on this show as going too far?
C.K.
Well, yeah, if it's done gratuitously, and you're just enjoying being a pig — that's a shortsighted goal. We're not saying f**k because we get to say f**k. We say f**k on the show because, folks say f**k. They always do. I feel more comfortable, personally, when people say f**k. I get a little edgy when folks don't curse, 'cause I know they're holding something back. Whenever I hear about a president cursing in private life, I just immediately like him. I wish George Bush would say, 'Saddam Hussein is a f**kin' asshole and we had to get him.' If he had said that I could've gotten behind the war. But if you hear f**k 50 times in a sentence, you just get a little bored.
HBO
You wear a lot of hats — you're an executive producer as well as a writer and the star. How does it work?
C.K.
There's all kinds of stuff going at once. It's kinda like a ship here — stuff has to be manufactured, sh*t has to get built, grips have to f**kin' put up all this stuff, electricians have to manufacture all these different lights, carpenters have to build things. It's like when there's an old-fashioned ship at sea, they have to keep rebuild the mast and the rest of the ship.
On Monday, we added a whole scene of Walter and Ellen, the neighbors, in their bedroom. So we had to find the actress, Kim Hawthorne, who wasn't scheduled for that week, and drag her in. Then the carpenters had to erect the bedroom and paint it, and the show's in a couple of days. Every time you're making these little conceptual decisions — 'let's put Ellen in it' — all hell breaks loose. Someone's gotta go buy some wood [laughs], someone's gotta go order that bed, these dudes gotta hang lights, furniture has to come outta storage.
As a producer you have to have that in your head. You can't show up on Tuesday and say, 'Hey, guys, I just came up with three new great ideas.' If they are causing that much trouble, they're not that great. Otherwise you just spend too much money, and you break the back of people that are working here.
HBO
You also work as a team with writers, but you've written a few of the scripts yourself?
C.K.
Yeah, I wrote three this season. I wrote the pilot and then I wrote three scripts. But I wrote the writer's draft, which is the one that I went off and wrote on my own. Then it gets thrown on the operating table and everybody does their job. The writers go through it and we all mash around and mix it up. It's a plastic thing, it's not set in stone — it can't be. It needs to change and change. The writers act as a team, and I spend all the time with them that I can when I'm not onstage.
HBO
It seems like every cast member has either a stand-up background or a lot of comedy under their belt — was that a goal?
C.K.
Yeah, these are all people that have done live stuff and know how to step up to an audience and share with them. The thing I like about this show is that we're performing it for a live audience — its live comedy. My favorite sitcoms were like that when I was younger. "All in the Family" — the reason the things Archie said were so big and explosive were 'cause he's saying 'em in front of a bunch of people, and then he had to freeze his face for like a minute and a half for laughs, and that just gave you this energy. And the laughs were all messy — the sound was bad on that show — but that made it kind of a rough and tumble. The same with "The Honeymooners," but Ralph dealt with the long laughs differently — he would walk around while people were laughing.
So I wanted something that felt like that, where you could see that the actors are having to stop and stand there because people are laughing too hard for them to continue — and they're feeding off the energy of an audience. We're going some distance with stuff to hear an audience not just laugh, but go 'Jesus, these guys are nuts...it's fun to watch them do that.' Everybody here on this show has that skill, so we're taking advantage of it.
HBO
Is that also one of the reasons why you chose to videotape as opposed to film?
C.K.
Yeah, because when you watch something on videotape, it feels live, like you're really there. Once you put something on film you're looking at an image of something, you're looking at a photograph of something and it's grainy and it looks nice, but I don't think it makes it funnier.
Our sets are also very shallow. The whole idea was to have every actor, no matter where they are, they're always close to the audience. It makes life a little hard. And we gave the audience a really steep rake, so that even the person in the back row is extremely close to the actor's head. So when a person laughs, the guy standing there feels it.
HBO
You have a lot of scenes with Kelly, the young girl who plays your daughter Lucy, and she gets a lot of big laughs.
C.K.
It's great. She's smart. We picked her because she's a very real kid. And I'd let anybody steal the scene from me — it's a huge load off my back. I love that I just say stuff to Kelly and her lines are the ones that get explosions. That's the best. It's the same with most people on the show — I'm probably the least funny person on the show, and I think that means it's a good show. When I'm with Jim Norton and Mike, I'm like a stick in the mud. I just go, 'You guys are d@!ks,' and shut up. Then they say all this outrageous stuff and they get the laughs. And that makes me very happy.
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NEW!
Get Your "One Night Stand" with Louis C.K. DVD. Available at the HBO Store.
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