dos and don'ts

Louis C.K. Thinks He Shouldn’t Smoke Pot or Tweet

Comedian Louis C.K. attends SNL 40th Anniversary Celebration at Rockefeller Plaza on February 15, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images)
Louis C.K. Photo: Larry Busacca/Getty Images

On the heels of Louis C.K.’s recent tweet-centric Sarah Palin apology, the comedian shed some light on why he’s since left the microblogging platform. Visiting the Opie & Jim Norton Show, C.K. said that tweeting didn’t make him feel good, and he didn’t like the amount of people who had access to his self-described subpar material. C.K. also talked about his pot use and how it almost led to a very weird, very not-funny season five of Louie. All this to say, it doesn’t seem like C.K.’s going to return to Twitter or frequent pot use anytime soon. Cue bagpipes.

Here’s what he told Opie.

About Twitter:

It didn’t make me feel good, it made me feel bad instead, so I stopped doing it. I just thought, This thing doesn’t make me feel good. Every time I say anything on here, I wish I hadn’t said it. And then I’ll write a couple things to try and fix it, and I’ll just feel worse. Just any time I tweeted anything,  I was like, Ugh, I don’t like the way that came out. And then four-and-a-half million people saw it. Like it was the worst things I ever said. Heard and seen by the most people. It’s like the worst possible scenario.

I don’t give a fuck about [what people wrote to me]. Reading it and writing it depressed me. I hate it. It is everybody’s worst side. When you read it, you read the stuff people say, and it’s like, Ugh, why would you say that? And then you look at them as a person, and you go, You’re not even that bad of a person. It’s too instant. I don’t think the speed helps dialogue. I think it hurts — I think it’s why everything’s kind of fucked up and polarized. Because people are going too fast, they’re trying to react too quickly. You know like blog things, people write a whole think piece about, Here’s why this person’s wrong. And then you can even tell that they, probably a week later, went, Ugh, I should’ve given that more thought. I don’t like it. I hate it. I hate the smarminess of little tweets. Just came back from meh-meh-meh — here’s my joke about it. There’s no quality to it.

I don’t think I was an entertaining Twitter. I mostly — to me the point of Twitter was just to announce that I was doing something. It was just to get the word out. And then people go, All you do is promote. Yeah, that’s what the fuck it is. It’s like watching a commercial for a Ford Explorer, and you’re like, Well, why don’t you something else besides tell me how good an Explorer is? And the Explorer’s like, I’m a fucking car, I’m just trying to sell myself.

About weed and Louie season five:

I wanted to take a year off again, I wanted to not start shooting until the fall, and [FX] agreed. So then a couple months went by — this is after I finished last season, I was really tired. A couple months went by, and one night, I got high, I smoked pot. And I got excited about a whole idea for the next season. I was like, I think I figured out next season. I’ve got an amazing idea for next season. I started writing it. I was like, This is gonna be so great, I wanna do this now. I wrote to the President of FX, because the next morning he was going to announce that we were taking a year off. So I said, Hold the announcement, can I come back after all? In the spring? And he said, Shit, okay, I got to talk to everybody. So he went and talked to everybody, and then he wrote me back and said, You have to say what you’re doing now, because we have to announce this. And he said, We already spent the money for a full season, but you can do a partial season, if you want to come back soon. And I was like, Totally! So he announced that the next morning, and then I woke up, and I looked at all the shit I wrote when I was high, and I was like, This is terrible. This is terrible stuff! I didn’t use a single idea. I had like 10 pages written. Ten stoned pages.

The whole plot was that Doug Stanhope, who was on the show a few years ago as Eddie, this suicidal comic — I run into him in New York, and he’s wearing a suit and tie and he’s just cleaned up his act and he’s making money. He’s like an investment banker or something like that. We end up opening a comedy club together. I had this idea, I open a comedy club. And I become a club owner, and I thought, That’s such a cool idea. And I wrote all these ideas about young comics coming and stuff like that. … It just stunk, it was really bad. … I made a huge decision that had impacts on my and a lot of other people’s lives — because a lot of people work for me — and I was stoned at the time.

I do very little [pot], it’s like every couple weeks. I’m very paranoid about drug use. If I get high like twice in a week, I’m like, I have a problem, and I stop. Because I don’t think it’s good for comics — getting high, it takes your will away and it makes you too comfortable. So I don’t do it a lot, and I got kids, I can’t be fucking around with that shit. But once every couple weeks, smoke a little marijuana. I bought a big thing of marijuana like 10 years ago, so I smoke very old marijuana. It’s really old and dusty.

Louis C.K. Thinks He Shouldn’t Smoke or Tweet