Feels similar to when Howard Stern got divorced. A huge part of why those guys could talk the way they did was because you knew (or felt like you knew) that deep down they were actually loving family guys.
The guy who goes home to his wife and kids can get away with slamming them onstage and still have it be endearing in a way. The guy who's no longer with his wife and kids and tells nasty jokes comes off sounding a lot different. Will be interesting to see how this impacts his standup.
Update: CK says he'll no longer talk about his wife in his act. Also, he's got custody of his kids for half of each week so it seems like that will still be a big part of his comedy. He addresses the divorce issue in some recent interviews...
In "Interview: Louis C.K., 'Chewed Up'" [Dead Frog], he says, "Divorce is not death. People treat it like it’s death. And it’s not. It’s another life."
But what divorce has done to me as a person and a father it’s a huge. It’s another avenue that’s unexplored. And in a good way. I tried to say this on stage once but it didn’t come out funny. But these are all doors that you can’t look through before you walk through them. There’s no peephole on the children door and on the divorce door.
I think just like when I was on the other side with other parents and saying how it feels for real for parents who are raising their kids and putting the work in. That was a cathartic thing for me and for my audience. And I think the same can be the same thing here, because, Jesus, more than half the people are divorced now.
In an interview on The Sound of Young America, he says, “No good marriages end in divorce.”
