Louis CK

Described as the “greatest comic mind of the last quarter century” by Chris Rock and “the funniest stand up working in America” by Ricky Gervais, Louis C.K. won an Emmy writing for the former’s TV show and appears in the latter’s upcoming debut as a Hollywood director, This Side of The Truth.

“I look horrible in that movie,” 40-year-old C.K. concedes of his role as the slobbish Greg, best friend of Gervais’ character Mark, who has learned to lie in a world where everyone instinctively tells the truth. “If I traded on my looks, it would be the end of my movie career. The character was originally a bit of a one-joke affair but Ricky ended up writing more for me. I’m basically his dog. A noble, loyal, smelly creature. But I think it’s going to be a great film. It’s really inventive and Ricky’s a master.”

The pair have become firm friends, with their respective blogs something of a mutual love-in, and C.K. has acknowledged the influence of The Office on his own short-lived cult sitcom Lucky Louie, which also featured Rick Shapiro.

Born Louis Szekely in Washington D.C., to a father of Mexican-Catholic and Hungarian-Jewish descent and mother of Irish stock, he chose C.K. as the easiest condensation of his surname to pronounce. Arriving in Edinburgh for two nights on the back of an acclaimed run in London and a characteristically odd interview from Richard Madeley, he’s promising an updated version of his concert show Chewed Up.

“Old stuff really ages fast for me,” he says. “But Chewed Up hasn’t been seen at all over here, so I’ll be mixing it up, coming up with new material while I’m in the UK.”

He started performing stand-up in Boston at 17 but quit after two gigs, reasoning that “I was too young to identify with the audience, because you can’t drink there until you’re 21.” When he returned to the circuit, he reckons it took him some 15 years to find his authentic stand-up voice, a sort of unblinking, brutally honest critique of the American nuclear family and society.

“I expected to get booed,” he says of those first portrayals of a rocky marriage and irritating daughters, “but this stuff seems to really strike a chord with people. Everyone has ugly, horrible, difficult thoughts about their kids but they don’t often share them. Not only on stage, but over coffee with other parents. All I’m doing is reacting honestly. My feeling about having a family is that it's incredibly high stakes. It’s very difficult and it makes you want to kill yourself and your children.”

Unlike many other popular comics, C.K. rejects the notion that comedic material about families should always be mainstream.

“There’s two boring ways to do stand-up,” he explains. “One is trying to figure out what the audience wants. Because that’s easy, everybody knows what most people laugh at. But I’d want to kill myself if I was writing comedy like that. The other boring way is to simply dig your own dick and balls and not give a shit who laughs, making no attempt to communicate. To be this self-encased, self-absorbed asshole. To me the great thing is to take people to places they weren’t expecting, to travel them to your fucked-up ideas. Some comedians have kids and they think this’ll be a goldmine, but I never thought of them that way.”

With his smooth, bassy delivery, C.K. shares the vocabulary and volume of a shock comic, peppering his set with the words “faggot” and “cunt”, and summarising a less than sparkling show in Dublin recently with “holy nigger tits, did they hate me!” But he claims he's actually trying to connect with audiences rather than instinctively offend.

“I don’t set out to shock people, but I don’t mind if I do, so long as it’s something that comes from a real thought or feeling that I’ve had. I never go ‘wow, what the fuck was I thinking there?’ Because I know exactly what I was thinking there”.

It was on the internet that Gervais discovered C.K. and it’s online too that his greatest notoriety resides.

“I did a thing on YouTube about the Catholic Church and molester priests that sometimes I look at and shout ‘Jesus buddy, come on!’” he admits. “To certain people, that’s probably the most purely offensive thing I’ve ever done. But I don’t care.”

A writer for NBC’s Late Night With Conan O’Brien when it first aired and later for David Letterman, C.K. progressed to The Chris Rock Show, directing Rock in the movie Pootie Tang.

“Culturally, Chris and I are the same people,” he ventures. “East Coast kids, the same age with the same music interests, got into stand-up at the same time, both with two girls the same age that we’re raising. So we’ve always kind of paralleled and comedically we laugh at the same things.

“Conan was the best job I ever had working for somebody else, because it was my first and the show was being developed from the ground up, so that was a great experience. Letterman was just a job. Chris though, he felt like one of us. There really wasn’t a head writer on that show, he just let us all do our thing. We used to go to baseball games with him when we should have been writing. And we got to do bits that I’m very proud of still.”

As with finding his comedic voice, it took C.K. 15 years to persuade his wife Alix to marry him, after proposing when he met her at a house party aged 18.

“I told her we should get married, excused myself, disappeared and vomited, came back and kept trying. Which is probably a parallel for my stand-up career. I was failing, went away, puked, and tried again.”