At the intersection of comedy and cancelation, Louis C.K.’s sexual misconduct scandal is examined, recapitulating The New York Times article. This is less about presenting new information than it is about the fallout of what happens after in cases like Louis C.K.’s soft-cancellation. What happens is the cancelled gets back to work and those who cancelled him, are now saddled with the baggage of forever being associated with this man’s masturbation habits, and face real work and life consequences themselves.
And folks wonder why not everyone just comes out and says it. That’s the main throughline here, as the rest just summarizes what has happened and what we already know about it. The doc focuses on interviews as the main text, with the women Louis C.K. made his victims, with members of the comedy community, and entertainment reporters.
When Louis C.K. returned to the stage after a two year break, the subject of his fetish for public masturbation just became another joke, just like his absence from comedy became another joke — and suddenly, here is this comedian who so often stood for the left-out and misunderstood, once examined our worst tendencies, and now he’s standing before us, telling us actually what’s funny is his own misbehavior.
Under close focus, Sorry/Not Sorry is interesting but doesn’t arrive at enough conclusions. It chapters its segments and awkwardly edits around these episodes — often the sound just cuts away, and it turns over to the next tile, and we may think, let’s just continue the story and tell it naturally through editing — if the story is right you do not need to spell it out what arc we are in. And yet, this doc still allows these women to speak again, and on camera, and is a curious study of the after-effects of cancellation, on which we just haven’t done enough research, as the topic begs for deeper coverage than the scope of this project necessarily allows.