Editor’s Note: The following story contains material related to sexual harassment and assault. To reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline, call 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit online.rainn.org.
“#MeToo is a solidarity movement for survivors, not a rehabilitation program for rapists and sexual assaulters.” The statement was YouTuber Kat Blaque’s response on Twitter (now X) to comedian Michael Ian Black’s August 2018 tweet supporting the “comeback” of recently disgraced comedian Louis C.K. The exchange came less than a year after the New York Times reported on allegations by five women of sexual misconduct by C.K. Following the November 2017 story, C.K. published a statement confirming that he had made inappropriate comments to and masturbated in front of female colleagues, and vowing to “step back and take a long time to listen.” Nine months later, he returned to the stage with an unannounced performance at the Comedy Cellar in New York and new material that addressed his career repercussions (he claimed to have lost $35 million in one day) and reframed the misconduct as an embarrassing kink rather than the reported coercion and intimidation, where asking permission is consent enough.
Sorry/Not Sorry, a documentary directed by Cara Mones and Caroline Suh and produced by the New York Times, and released on streaming platforms this past July, takes on the comedian’s misconduct and its aftermath, in which C.K. (who declined requests to appear in the film) returned to the comedy circuit and quickly regained an audience. As he was selling out shows at Madison Square Garden and winning a Grammy, the women who spoke out faced ridicule, threats, shaming, and blacklisting.
Before the scandal, C.K. was widely regarded in the United States as a “moral conscience” in confessional comedy and a creative genius. (Full disclosure: I’ve never followed his comedy and knew little about him before the scandal.) A joke about men “being the biggest threat to women in history” helped earn him feminist credit with some fans and critics in the early 2010s, and his acclaimed FX sitcom about the trials of a single dad/standup comedian in New York City skyrocketed him to cultural icon status.
Sorry/Not Sorry focuses on three of the people who spoke out about their experiences: comedy performers and writers Jen Kirkman, Megan Koester, and Abby Schachner. The reporters who broke the story, plus a few critics and industry figures, also offer their reflections, critical and self-critical ones from comedian Andy Kindler and TV producer and writer Michael Schur, and more forgiving comments from Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman. In a questionable decision by the filmmakers, Black also gets the opportunity to ambivalently rationalize his 2018 tweet.
The film’s greatest strength is its attention to these three women’s lives after speaking out. Koester left comedy. Schachner was mocked in a Netflix special by Dave Chappelle, who said she has a “brittle-ass spirit.” As Kirkman notes, and Schachner and Koester reiterate, “When you say anything as a woman, it’s the scarlet letter, it just becomes who I am.” Even more eye-opening than a system that reduces survivors to their abuse while allowing C.K. the multidimensionality of a flawed artist is the revelation that his misconduct was an open secret in the comedy community. Gawker published a “blind item” about it in 2012 and, in 2015, a report from an anonymous source. Koester, who heard rumors about C.K. early in her career, puts the gossip in perspective, saying, “If I know about this shit, everybody knows about this shit.”
Implicit throughout the film is the question of what it means for someone — specifically a White, cis-het man — to be “canceled,” and how claiming cancellation is often a route to reclaiming power. As multiple interviewees point out, no one is really “canceled”; many media figures who claim to have been canceled receive kinder judgment and boast larger audiences (and incomes) than the survivors of their abuse. Coming in the wake of revelations about Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, C.K.’s scandal seemed to strengthen #MeToo at the time, but it’s since become an exercise in justification: In Dworman’s words, the comedian got “swept into” the movement’s wake-up call about “how awful men in power can be.”
No one in the film claims that C.K.’s violations are on par with rape, but arguing for degrees of violence is a slippery slope toward enabling and exonerating abuse. Likewise, Black’s tweet, while stunningly ignorant, echoed a broader impulse to reinstate the industry’s power balance. Not only is #MeToo not a rehab program for sexual predators, it is not about installing an “enlightened” patriarchal system, which is one way of considering C.K.’s pre-scandal comedy that framed jokes about masturbation and base sexual urges as sympathetic to exploited women, and deflected attention from the perversity of projects like his unreleased, Woody Allen-inspired film I Love You Daddy. (It’s also worth noting that C.K.’s celebrated takes on male shortcomings assume a gender- and heteronormative perspective that often pivots on a cliched “horny guy”/“beleaguered woman” dynamic.)
Comedy, more than most other culture industries, is a bastion of semi-sanctioned misogyny and sexual impropriety. As such, the filmmakers could have interrogated the comedy community’s post-scandal silence a little more. At the same time, the bare minimum of condemning C.K.’s behavior becomes a feat in this environment because its standards are so low. As Kirkman says, “You don’t know something’s weird because you’ve been socialized in this world where men get to treat women however they want.”
The apparent stakes of safeguarding comedy’s boys’ club status quo are evident in the defiantly “anti-woke” direction of some of C.K.’s post-scandal material and the backlash of verbal assaults and threats against the accusers; an article Koester wrote about the rumors before the Times piece led to a “tidal wave of hate,” while Julia Wolov, whom C.K. masturbated in front of without consent during the 2002 Aspen Comedy Festival, published an essay in the Canadian Jewish News that reflected on “getting hate mail from Louis C.K. supporters who tell [accusers] to kill themselves.”
Comedy will remain rife with sexual impropriety and other forms of oppression as long as its superstars defend punching down as “just a joke” and consolidate their influence by vilifying survivors and casting themselves as victims. Sorry/Not Sorry is incisive and disturbing because it magnifies the machinations that normalize misogyny and abuse. If there’s a takeaway, maybe it’s that there is no “road back” for C.K. and other powerful abusers that doesn’t restore an abuse of power; the only option is to hand power over to the survivors.
Sorry/Not Sorry (2023), directed by Cara Mones and Caroline Suh, is available for streaming on various platforms.
