Louis C.K. and Philosophy: You Don't Get to Be Bored (Popular Culture and Philosophy)

Charlie Rose has called Louis C.K. the philosopher-king of comedy, and many have detected philosophical profundity in his material.

Twenty-five philosophers examine the wisdom of Louis C.K. from a variety of philosophical perspectives. The chapters draw upon C.K. s standup comedy, the show Louie, and C.K. s other writings.

One writer looks at the different meanings of C.K. s statement, You re gonna be dead way longer than you were alive. One chapter shows the affinity of C.K. s sick of living this bullshit life with Kierkegaard s sickness unto death. Another pursues Louis s thought that we may by our lack of moral concern live a really evil life without thinking about it.

C.K.'s insistence that things that are not can t be points to the philosophical problem of nothingness in relation to being. His religion is apathetic agnostic, conveyed in his thought experiment that God began work in 1982. Louis s argument that you can have the kind of body you want if you make yourself want a disgusting, shitty body, is the Stoic ethics of Epictetus. And, as C.K. has shown in so many ways, the fact that we re soon going to die has its funny side.