'Louie' season five finale review: 'The Road Part 2'

For all its surreal moments or down-to-Earth amusements, existentialism plays a heavy role in Louie. As the comedian continues on his haggard comedy road trip in this week’s “The Road Part 2,” now mopping his way through Oklahoma City, Louie tries desperately to make good on his existence on his life as a comedian. The thrill is now gone, as he said last week, and this is just something he does. But how, and why, does making people laugh for a living become mundane?

Like anything in life, that which is done ad nauseam becomes deflating and exasperating. Sure, practicing your craft over and over again may make you better at it, but the thrill and joy of it — if there’s any at all — begins to fate as a repetition forms. What once seemed so enchanting before feels like the tedious job it now is. There are ways to ignore this, of course. There are also some who can make due with what they do for a living, just like Kenny (Jim Florentine), Louie’s warm-up comedian and condo roommate for the duration of his week-long stay.

Kenny is many things Louie isn’t. Although they’re both middle-aged, comedians and fathers, Kenny is in good shape, good-looking, fun-loving, hard-drinking, womanizing and just a good time to be around. He’s not a bummer, like he calls Louie later on, and even uses his own wrap-up after Louis C.K.'s hour to poke fun at the headliner comedian with a lazy impression. Even if his impression is surface-level at best, it get the cheap laughs Louie couldn’t gather in the midst of his contemplative, life crisis-heavy set.

Only mere snippets of Louie’s sets are seen here this week. Although the two jokes we are shown center on how white people call other races minorities, an older joke from the comedian, and how we can’t know how old we are when we die — the latter one done in a different context in his recent special, Louis C.K.: Live at the Comedy Store, which aired just after last night’s finale. It serves as a bit of foreshadowing, although that comes in due time. But it mostly allows us to see the misery of Louie’s existence has come even to his stage work — that which was once sacred and where he felt alive. He’s not even fun on stage anymore; he’s a real dark cloud of an individual. This season opened with an exasperated Louie talking about how he doesn’t care if there’s extraterrestrial life, and now it would seem he doesn’t care about any life, one way or the other.

But if Louie’s a bummer, then Kenny’s a hack. He’s a cheap everyman comic, the kind who builds their careers on bathroom humor and fart jokes because they’re quick, easy and primarily inoffensive. Louie considers him a disgrace to the profession, but his words come back to haunt him. For he must answer the question: are farts really not funny? Kenny asks him directly to look him in the eye and say farts are never funny, and this is something Louie cannot do. As a broken Louie admits, there’s never been a fart he hasn’t laughed at. Be it one of his own or someone else’s at a funeral, he can’t accept such lowbrow antics are beneath him because it’s a little toot that comes out your asshole and smells bad.

And as Louie continues to tear up — the second time he’s done so this season — it’s apparent C.K. wants to show his character at his lowest points. It’s not as though he’s lost the will to laugh or have fun, but rather he can’t find what made him happy in the first place. He thought Pamela (Pamela Adlon) would be the answer to his problems, and yet he had to learn she’s her own person with her own aspirations. She’s not some kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl here to save him from his ever-continuing funk. She’s just a woman who wants someone to joke around with, and one who’ll have sex with her when she wants some. This is the same woman, after all, who had her most intimate moment with Louie this season after she forced him to apply make-up and embody a female persona.

Even five seasons in, it remains unclear just how much Louie reflects the real-life persona. C.K. does share the same name as his series, and the sad sack he plays is intentionally a fictionalized version of him, and when he breaks down and realizes he’s losing what he loves, it’s hard to not to ask if this is C.K. talking about his real feelings today towards stand-up or even the FX series itself. This whole season made a point to bring back the fun of the original seasons, and it followed suit for the first couple episodes. Though, of course, its dark underbelly found itself again — distinctly in “Cop Story”, but most directly in these last two episodes.

Even when it looks like fun will be had in “The Road Part 2,” — Kenny and Louie worked things out, they met each other on eye level, more or less became friends and seemingly, finally create the fun people expect from stand-up road trip adventures — reality hits. Only a couple seconds of them drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels is screened before witnessing a 47 Louie throwing up in the toilet and Kenny getting ready to perform an unfortunate bathroom tradition in front of him, only to fall victim, quite literally, to “The Road Part 2”’s biggest tragedy and ultimate irony.

In both of these “The Road” episodes, we see early on shots of Louie getting hit hard in the knee by a passing flight attendant’s wheeled tray. This is to show how our lead cannot escape pain and also needs to accept his fate. A traveling comic is who he is, and now he must deal with these circumstances. Based on “The Road Part 2” and its eventual message, C.K. seemingly has grown a bit wiry of his life and its worth. That, for how successful and happy he would look with his creative freedom, there’s something unmistakably bleak about it all, yet he continues to find little ways to pretend to be someone he’s not. Is this what Louie is, or is the FX show what he’s trying to escape?

There are no clear answers, and it’s a futile task to get caught up in unanswered questions on C.K.’s show. After all, the entire series is designed around inconsistencies and how little anything really makes sense in our unconventional world. Yet it would have been nice to see what became of Paula and Louie, especially after their distant phone call in “Sleepover” suggested they cannot be as emotionally distant as Pamela wishes and Louie fears. This abridged season of Louie is remarkable in how its more scattershot narratives reflect an encompassing reflection on acceptance. Every week, Louie had to accept his failures or things he cannot understand, and the only real victories he’s held are to be one’s emotional savor, to get a good night’s rest and ultimately let his daughter believe he can be an old southern Civil War general.

In the wake of all this sadness, rejection and general disillusionment comes a man broken but still fundamentally able to guide himself. He doesn’t enjoy life the way he wants to, yet can still find engagement in his surroundings, sometimes in watching an old man’s violin skills or pretending to go back in time to become General Whoever for a pair of southern belles. It may not be hope, but it’s understanding and brazenness, even among the befuddlement of tragedy. Louie’s half dead now, as he notes on stage, and even though he may want to be more dead than ever he’s, in many ways, more alive than ever before. Whether true humor comes from the head or the ass, that’s something to laugh about.

Thanks for reading everyone. To find more weekly TV recaps from me, check back on Sundays to read my reviews for Silicon Valley and Happyish.

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