From our studios in new york, this is charlie rose. Louis c. K. Is here. Gq magazine calls in americas undisputed king of comedy. The New York Times says he is a performer of the moment, whose moment keeps getting bigger and bigger. In 2010 he created the Comedy Series louie, that revolves around a single father of 2 who struggles to balance his comedy career with being a single dad. It recently returned to fx after a 19 month hiatus. Here is the teaser for the new season. You wont admit you love me so am i ever to know you always tell me perhaps, perhaps, perhaps the allnew season of louie on fx. Not only do they talk about you being the undisputed king of comedy and people love this show, yours is deeper and broader. Comparisons to lenny bruce. Comparisons to bob dylan. Comparisons to being a philosopher king. Jesus. Do you want to not talk about that . [laughter] where does it come from . How do you see what you are . I dont know. Im just a comedian. I think that is the thing out what i am. I do a lot of things but i have a tv show. I act a little bit. Comic. Dad and a that is mostly what i am. Anything beyond that might get uncomfortable. Im good at writing, good at directing. Im good at that stuff. You are doing that. I been doing that for a while. I love doing those things. I always feel kind trying those things. Just trying that. It takes away to make a good meeting it takes a wild to a good comedian. Baked. Ght, ready to look at it from all angles. What does it take . It takes understanding life through living it. Being on stage a lot and not giving up. Being prepared to fail. Oh. Yeah. It is the road to being a good comic. If you always back away from tough things and find easy routes, you will do ok. Failure is what, not being funny . Knocks it seeding in the moment. Not succeeding in the moment. If you are starting to feel uncomfortable, there is a comfort factor that feels good. It is nice to wear it once in a while. When you stray off the road, like when youre on vacation, and you see everything that was laid out for you where everyone else has been, if you take a road to the side and feel uncomfortable all of a sudden, there is no obvious thing, but you are saying and learning a lot all of a sudden. Failure has been a subject of yours. Not just that failure shapes you, but you talk about it. It is a fascinating thing because most people avoided. If you can get to a place where you like it, you like what you get out of it, then it is new territory. . What you learn as a comedian 25 years, it takes 25 years to make comedian. What is it you learn . You learn presence. Youll are a oneness with an audience. You learn a sense of who you are and what your strengths are. Those are obvious to me. I think. Come quickly, stage presence comes quickly. Depending on who you are, how to write jokes and how to generate material and know it is going to work, that comes, the first 10 years you are building the skills. What question are timing, delivery. The material that works. Generating the jokes. You come up with your own thing. Connecting with an audience. Then there is all sorts of other things that happen. You are taught your best show gets higher and higher. That is the first thing. How good you are keeps increasing. The important thing, your worst show starts coming up. Your worst show needs to, close to your best show. Even on your worst night, you still get laughs. Shouldnt,t show your worst show should be closer to your best show. The margin should be like that. How does that happen . Experience prejust experience. There is hardly any situation that i havent seen. When i feel an audience, you have an instinct. Did you have the power of observation . You learned how to shape it. Eye. E life with a comedic that is just the way i look at things print im very curious. I like to look at a lot of things. Im always looking at life and thinking about it. I guess that is observation. It is being able to have people understand an observation from a strange place or personal. I guess the thing is once you get good at the skills and your bottom comes up, you are able to go try stuff that is probably not going to work. It is where you find, that is where you get better and more interesting. The good comics do that. To read about you is know that nothing even close is as important as your children. Easily. Being a dad is the most important job. What do they think . Do they love it . Its funny how you use us but it is not me. The standard that i do, ive change the way i talk about my kids because i like sharing my stand up with my kids. I like showing them what i do. The first time i ever showed, i bited my oldest daughter a i used to do about hide and seek with her. It was about getting frustrated that she would hide in plain sight coming literally. I would pretend that she wasnt there. That she was hiding better. I would say he i would say bs this was. I would rail about it and get angry. I would show it to her when she was six years old. Her younger sister was like that. She had a patronizing younger sister. I know exactly how you feel. She made that connection. She thought it was funny that i got so upset. She knew it was funny because, in real life, im not like that. I get upset like any parent does but not unreasonably so. Shethought no one would say to her friend i have the funniest dad in the world. I dont know. I hope that her thoughts about me are as a father. Im there for her when she gets off the boss. I take her home. I help her with her homework. I take care of them. That is what they want them to remember. The work is something that hopefully, when they are 18 years old or 19 years old they will google me and go that guy did a bunch of stuff when he was doing that. It is not important. I like to model a good life in my career as far as trying hard and being responsible. I tell them when it is Something Big at stake. When it doesnt go well or it does. I tell them that as a role model. I could be doing the same thing if i was working at some Company Making widgets. What interests me is that you seem to be fascinated by how show business works. As a student, but understanding the business model. Understanding. There was a story that how much you would charge for a night to a venue with that what they did and ticket prices. Because they had to suffer if they had not enough people there. They had to charge tickets as a safety valve. When you go work at a theater as a comic, or as a musician, you know they get a big guarantee that that is the conventional thing. You get a bunch of money up front. Whether the show books well or not you get to keep that money. That is asking a lot. In order to hedge against that and make that not such a big risk, the venue you need to spend a lot of money on advertising. They need to charge a lot of money for tickets. Anybody that does buy tickets, they get a quicker. You end up making less money. If the places so that your guarantee will of caused so much money to have been spent. You divide the profits with the promoter. You both dont make that much money. The audience pays a lot of money for tickets. If youre willing, i started to say lets have a guaranteed rate lets just do our best. The make and asked them to keep advertising budget lower. Fanshen also, i wanted the , i didnt want it to be difficult to see me. I get sick physically when i see that a ticket of mine cost 75. That is too much money. You did an amazing thing, to me, i identified with it, when you put the thing on your website. You said i would charge you five dollars. I hope you wont steal it. Pay five dollars. Hope you enjoy. Amazingly, david carr wrote a piece about this. I talked to him. Remember. It work. It did. The thing is i close the gap. I made the website easy to use. I close the gap between how easy it was to steal it and how easy was to just buy it. [laughter] because he could go to my site, and the five dollar purchase was a little bump in the road. It was almost like a viral video. Click on this and watch it, take one second and give five dollars per that was easier than to go to a pirate site and find a way to torrent it. A lot of Companies Make it tough for people to get stuck. Exists, if people cant buy it, they will take it. On the internet. They feel entitled. So, a lot of companies, they put stuff out and say you can only have it for one minute and we will take it back. When i went to australia, the first time, they had watched my show. It wasnt on tv there. It wasnt on itunes. They were stealing it. Regular people. Not crazy nerds. Regular family folks. They all stole it. They all downloaded it. We are not letting them watch it. We are not even giving the opportunity. They told me if your show was available we would buy it. But it is not. The world knows about it. So they just take it. What is your relation to other comedians . Do you watch them . You learn from them . Sure. Im a student of comedy. I love watching any comedian. I will watch any comedian and just hear. It is interesting to me because im fascinated by watching entertainers. They go to the museum and look at it clinically. Sure. Youre saying thats how we did that. You do the same thing. It is hard, if i have time to go, if i get a babysitter, i might watch the guy before me. Then i have to go home. I dont get to do that like i used to. When i started i just devoured comedy. I went to clubs every night even if i wasnt on stage. Seven nights a week. I would watch every comedian i could, good or bad. It didnt matter. I just watched. I just loaded it into my system. Im the same way but interviews. See how they do it. If you are in london, watch everybody can see. Is there a style that is interesting. Yes to find your own sense, but there is always something to learn about. Whether it is a baseball player watching another baseball player. A baseball player is watching baseball. Hes watching the same game. Standup, the same in whatever the comic is doing is not a vacuum. Youre watching standup happen. Youre watching how audiences reacting. The audience is such a mysterious animals us. You are always kept guessing. There are some nights you Good Luck Club and youre like i feel good. Im ready to have a good show. The audience has a strange unanimous grumpy feeling to them. How did these people all strangers to each other, they hate the show. How is it happening . I will never see shows and go i get this. It is an unquenchable thirst. You like chris rock. He is a great guy. We are both similar. We grew up around the same time. We were listening to van halen and led zeppelin in two different worlds but in the same east coast feeling. We always knew each other coming up. When i he gave me a great job working for him. Ira member i was working for his show. Everybody is happy. One day im next to him and his monologue marked or her so when he turned to me and said when he going to direct . When you going to do your own thing . Im happy to have you here, it is like a money league team and by barry bonds is hitting home runs every day. He yet to say get out of here. It is a get out of here. He wanted me out. He has always been a big brother and little brother at the same time. That youommon a moment say that thought comes to yourself . Ive got it. I know that there has been a i dont need to write for someone else print any to write for myself. I need to get out there and face it. I was doing standup at the time. I was getting off that way performance wise. I was putting this knowledge of how to make visual television funny. I was doing that with chris. Around that time, i started to think i should try to do this for me. It used to be said that negative energy, david letterman, at the time he got the kennedy honors, he would talk about carson. Carson was a guy who could anoint you. David and so many others. Todayyone claim that role . It used to be that. Anddid one set on carson, they called a three ring sign that was the thing. Youe did this, that meant were going to fill every club in the country for a year. Hed bring you to the couch. That was a big thing. Then you were a star right away. That was the way it was my with starting out. Everyone was trying to get on carson. Adding on letterman was another version of that. That me were the coolest new comment new comment. After carson, i did a set on letterman once. It went well. I was ready for data car be. I showed him my sets. He said when i was coming up, that would have changed your life. It didnt. I did letterman eight10 times. Set . It the same or do you change it question mark you cant repeat. Shows, peoplese try seinfeld and chris have a set. I go there all the time. And you dwell therein try im always trying out new stuff. Chris comes in. They just go one. Go on. The crowd is excited to see you. The thing with stand up, you cant abuse that. The first showed you do that isnt funny, your like everybody else. Chris and i have both said that we have done this. We try to ground their expectation. Do something that isnt going to please them to get to work. You go on stage. There is nothing useless when you come out of that. You Say Something not insulting but to take them down or bore them. Then you can get an honest repair he an honest reading. You been doing for the 19 months youve been off question the i did a big tour. England and norway, bunch of places. I didnt hbo special. I did an hbo show. I spent more time, i usually start working on the show in january and it would go on the air in june. I would do all the work and shoot it. This year i started writing in april for a show in may. I spent the whole year, i worked on it for a whole year. I did it more carefully this time. Isnt like sculpturing . I was talking to a friend of mine. There is to kind of sculpture, addition and subtraction. Yoution is where you have keep adding clay until you get the right shade. You cut aways that from the block so youre left with the thing. With the show it is both. You start with addition. You are glomming on pieces. Editing is the creation of the show. Youre carving away what doesnt belong. It is the negative space around it that defines it. It is amazing. It takes a year to build a show. That is a lot of sculpturing. Yes. You just keep layering and making sure it is good. Every moment is perfect. No. It is all wild. No more perfect that if you were growing a garden. It is not perfect. Maybe there is English Gardens were the rose, but this is like a wild garden. How important is beginning . When you first hit the stage . Pretty huge when you start. If you dont have the right footing with the crowds, you are lost. When you get to be a veteran, it doesnt matter. It doesnt. You walk out there in fee dont get them right there, you will get applause because they know you. Forever at even if whatever reason you can get them. It is a matter. You can throw them back and get them back again. That is where you get great. That is where you can get really good because you can just go, you guys go way. You knowre onstage, the future. You control the future. They dont know what you are going to say, but you do. It is unique thing that way. Fail if you think of it the right way. Once you get to that place where you can go backwards and forwards, anger them, make them happy, get them in a frenzy, and you know how to control that, that gives you the ability to can to try different things. What have the additions of movies made to you . American hustle. Good directors in both cases. I loved working with both of those guys. Theyre both great. And dynamic them interesting to watch directors. I like being a spectator. Going to a woody allen movie, but being in the front row seat. You are an it. Seat at a a floor next game knicks game. Thats what i enjoyed from it. These were short enough shoots that i could put them in my life. You can do drama and comedy. I like to act a real scene. Davids money was funny. It was more of a drama. Take a look at this. A scene from an earlier season talking about the car he drives. My life is evil. There are people who are starving in the world. I drive an infinity. That is really evil. There are people who just starve to death. That is all they ever did. There are people who are bored and go im hungry and then they die. [laughter] that is all they ever got to do. Car, havingm in my a great time and i sleep like a baby. [laughter] it is my fault. I could trade my infinity for really good car. No miles on it. I would get back 20,000. I could save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that money. Every day i dont do it. Every day i make them die with my car. [laughter] when was that . That was 2010. That was the first year of the show. That was from the pilot. You makerock told specials a masterpiece. You try to. They have long 70. You want to make them something. Specials or something. I use to describe it by the way they made samurai swords. They bang it and then folded and then bang again. They keep folding and banging it. They folded so that they are squeezing out the oxygen. Keep making it perfect. Hour, then folded into that. Get rid of the impurities committee doing that. I had a process i used to do that big closing bit. He can make you sluggish. It can make you sluggish. Lazy. , it is a 60 minute set. 20 minutes in, you are 20 minutes away from your big 20 minute closer. 20 minutes . If you have a strong one. 20 minutes in my kinkos for 20 minutes because of got this thing. I started making life hard for my cell by opening with the hardest material. Then you have a long way to go. I do follow the toughest material with stuff that is weak. I have no material to depend on. It is just an open wound at the end. This bill would this would become the closer. Then he put that at the beginning. You keep doing that until you have 90 minutes of closing bits. You could just swap them out. That ought to be the prescription for everybody. To take a hard look and make sure you are not posting and turn it upside down. Blow it up every 10 years. You might as well. But will be the point of doing this crazy stuff if youre not trying to do the best version . Could you imagine doing something in five years, under comedy or film, but doing so that you would never occur to you today . Is part of your minds to today being a cyst as full as you are, i want to push the boundaries of whatever . I love to do new things. I love to learn. Learning is my favorite thing. As it look at my career want to do the biggest thing. If i get offered something that is youre going to be the blockbuster, but on the animals sit and be this god, get paid 50 trillion. That is not interesting. I dont know what it is. If they want you to do this, yes, im excited for that. Somebody will say go to hungry and make a tv station. All right rate all tried. All right, i will try. Talking about being single. Here it is. Fund to be single at 41 years old. It is hard to start again. It is hard to think sa something nice will happen. I know too much. I know even if it is nice, it is going to lead to if you smile at someone, you decided something is going to happen. You might have a nice couple of dates. Then she will stop calling you back. You will day for a long time and then she will have sex with one of her friends. Or you will get married and it wont work out and youll get divorced and let and split your friends. Or you meet epa perfect person. Even argue well. You grow together. You have