"If Something is UNCOMFORTABLE, Go For IT!" - Louis C.K. - Top 10 Rules

I don't think I can do this. I think it's a great push for an artist. This is gonna be fucking impossible. If something is uncomfortable in a place that makes people uncomfortable, I wanna go, hey, come on. You got mad at me 'cause I said, I introduced you and said, he's the best comedian in the world.

Hello, Believe Nation, it's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in people more than they believe in themselves. And my sincere hope is that if you see in yourself what I see in you, you'll be able to change the planet. So to help you on your journey today, we're gonna learn from comedian, actor, and writer Louis C.K. and my take on his Top 10 Rules of Success Volume 2. Rule number 7 is my personal favorite, and I'd love to know which one you guys like the best. Also, as you're watching, if you hear something that really resonates with you, please leave it down in the comments below and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired by it as well. And if you leave it within the first couple hours of this video going live, you have a chance to win one of 2 daily prizes.

One finds oneself, you know, some resistance and obstacle is always good for art, I think. So it's like if you have a marble, you know, Michelangelo has this big block of marble, and he needs to dig David out of there, right? Not only does he need to chip away just the right amount of marble, but he has to then find this thing in there, and then he has to smooth it out, make it perfect, right? If David had, if Michelangelo was given a marble that just comes away, really, would he have been a better sculptor? You know what I mean? There's something about, The having to navigate. The actual physical work of it, or like mental and emotional work of it. Yeah, and just being like, I don't think I can do this. I think it's a great push for an artist. This is gonna be fucking impossible. When you think about some, a lot of the greatest movies were made very much in the studio system, and they were made by people who were faced with all kinds of fear and myopia from their studios and they led them out of it. They had— I think sometimes it can sharpen your vision when you have to convince people.

But it takes a while to make a comedian, doesn't it?

Yeah, it takes a long, long time. I mean, to make a really thoroughly good, you know, a ripe, baked, ready for, you know, ready to pull the bottle out of the can.

Ready to prime time or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, ready to really actually look at from all angles.

What does it take? Living.

Yeah, you know, it takes understanding life through living it, and then being on stage an awful lot and not giving up. That's all. It's just, you know.

And being prepared to fail.

Oh yeah, that's really the road. Failure's the road to being a great comic, I think. So if you always kind of back away from the tough things and find easy routes, you'll do okay.

So failure is what? Not being funny?

Yeah, well, not succeeding in the moment.

So maybe being funny but nobody got it or something.

Right, if you don't get a laugh or you have a bad show or you're starting to feel a little uncomfortable. There's a comfort factor that feels real good and it's nice to wear it once in a while, but when you stray off the road, you know, it's like if you're on a vacation and you're seeing everything that was sort of laid out for you where everybody else has been, but if you take a road off to the side and you feel a little uncomfortable all of a sudden, you know what I mean? There's no obvious tourist things, what you're seeing, you're learning an awful lot all of a sudden.

But failure has been a subject of yours too. I mean, not just— yeah, not just that failure shapes you, but you talk about failure.

Yeah, it's a fascinating thing because most people avoid it. So if you can get to a place where you kind of like it, you know, I mean, you like what you get out of it, uh, then it's, it's new territory. Can you tell me about the edge in the edgy comedy? Because, you know, you're, you're really cutting close to some some things within the entertainment industry. Tell us a little bit about, you know, why you wanted to tell this story. You know, it's just— I guess I like to go up to electric fences and pee on them and shit on them. I just— I find anything that's— I guess a habit that I have in stand-up and in filmmaking or whatever is that if something is uncomfortable in a place that makes people uncomfortable, I want to go, "Hey, come on." And they go, "Eh." You know, when I'm on stage and I start to raise a subject, I always see people go, "Please don't talk about this." And I just kind of go, "It's alright, just a few ideas about it." And they go, "Eh." But if you can take people to that place and then make them laugh and maybe illuminate a few different points of view in a circle, And then they leave a little less afraid of that area, or a little— and also they just, they're a little more confused. I like, I like to— if people feel like they know something about something, I think being— if you go from knowing to confused, that means you got educated. That's the way I feel about it. I did Lucky Louie, which was an HBO sitcom, and HBO was great, and they kind of let you— they, they have, um, they let you do more things They let you do things other people don't let you do, like curse and stuff. But they do have their tastes, and they do have their— and I had more of a committee, and I was also younger. I wasn't ready to control what I did yet. It wasn't really until I did Louie on FX that I had total control. But I don't always look at things as control. I look at it as responsibility. I like having the responsibility. That's why I like to pay for stuff when I can. And not even have a financier because it's, I'm responsible. I don't wanna drag other, I have really, sometimes what I think are some pretty bad ideas. And I mean bad meaning not likely to pay off. And I don't wanna drag anybody else into it. So, it's kind of, I think it was Platoon maybe, some movie where guys, you know, they're coming in over the wire, one of those war things. And the guy wants to, it's so bad that he wants them to drop napalm on him and all his soldiers, right? So whatever the colonel says, like, this is my, just, I'm, this is my call. So I wanna be able to always be able to do that. Drop napalm on yourself. That's right, on myself and others.

Okay.

Self-love is a good thing, but self-awareness is more important. You need to once in a while go, oh, I'm kind of an asshole. You have to have that thought once in a while, or you're a psychopath.

You know, like when you say to a friend of yours, "you're being an asshole." And they're like, "No, I'm not." Well, it's not up to you if you're an asshole or not. That's up to everybody else. You don't get to say no to that. "You're an asshole." "No, I'm not." "Oh, sorry, I thought, okay, I'm glad I checked. I guess you're not." If somebody tells you you're an asshole, you should go, "Oh, shit.

All right, what happened? How did I get here?" It's like somebody saying, "You know you got something on your face." "No, I don't." Yeah, stand-up is unlike any other art form in that way that you can do, like if you're a musician, you're gonna be pretty exact every time you perform. But you look back on shows and you go, I messed all that up. I was driven by fear instead of by intention.

I mean, I think we deal with fear more viscerally than almost anyone. I mean, you feel the audience's fear, your own fear, the whole show It's about quelling fear. And that's what you're talking about when you have a bit that you really are confident in and you know the end of it's really strong and the audience feels your fear level go down. And they relax and they go, oh, he seems to be very confident in this one.

How do you balance your life as a father and your professional pursuits? Well, I put the kids first. The kids are there. They get first crack at me. And I make work with what's left of my time. So I'm divorced, which really helps that. It does. Because I share custody of my children. I get them half the time, roughly half. So it means there's a clear divide between my time with my kids and not. So basically what I do is when I'm with my kids, I really put my time into them. And it's evolved over the years, because when I started, doing that, having the kids half the time, they were very little. One of them wasn't even in school. So I didn't work when I had the kids, ever. But since they are in school and now even they can get home on their own, it's crazy how much they can do by themselves and don't want. I mean, I've asked my daughter, like, maybe I come by school and walk you home. No, don't do that. Not interested. So I have more time now to work. When I'm with them, but I don't do any production, all right? I don't go away. I mean, I've just told myself someday if I'm still doing this when my kids grow up, I'll go do something like go to Africa and make a movie, you know what I mean? Or be in another country. But until they grow up, I just gotta do something I can do for half the week in New York. When I made Louie, it was very expensive because that was a series, and I should have been shooting 5 days. 12-hour days for 5 days, but that doesn't fit my parenting schedule. So I shot 3 days a week, and the third day was like a half day. And the other days I made use of. I would edit or do pre-production. But we've made it work. If you have to do it, you'll do it. And look, I'm very lucky. I got FX to agree to let me do Louie. But it's not only luck. I was offered a lot of movie and TV parts, TV writing jobs before Louie that I said no to because it didn't fit that criteria. And I just stayed on the road, and I stayed obscure for longer than I probably would have until somebody said, "You can do it any way you want." And the kids, putting my kids first led to that discipline, and it led to the best job I ever had. And now everybody just knows that I do that. So it would be absurd to most crews that we're shooting something with a fucking crane and a million extras or whatever, and I go, "I gotta go 'cause I gotta make carrot sticks and pick her up." Yeah. Stage presence comes pretty quickly, depending on who you are. How to write jokes and how to generate material and know it's gonna work, that sort of comes, you know, first 10 years you're building the skills.

The basic skills are what? Timing, delivery?

Yeah, timing and delivery and material. Material that works. Generating the jokes, because most comedians, you write your own stuff, you come up with your own thing. Connecting with an audience, and then there's all sorts of other things that happen. Your top, your best show keeps getting higher and higher, that's the first thing. How good you can do keeps increasing, but then the really important thing is how bad your worst show starts coming up. I think that's for any performer, you know? Your worst show needs to come up close to the best show so that even on your worst night, you're still—

So in the new season, your best show shouldn't, the worst show should be much closer to the best show.

The margin should be like that, that's right, yeah.

Yeah, how does that happen?

Well, experience, just experience. It's just, you know, there's hardly any situation that I haven't seen, so. You know, when I feel an audience, you know, you get an instinct for things. Once you get really good at the skills and your bottom comes up, you're able to go try stuff that's probably not gonna work. And that's where you find, that's where you get more, that's where you get better and more interesting. When you're, you know, the good comics do that anyway. When I was like 19 or 20, I got to open for Jerry at the Paradise in Boston. This is before you had your show. It's the first time I opened for you. It was a big club, it was like a, a rock club that they did comedy with bigger acts, right? And I got to open for you, and, uh, you got mad at me because I said— I introduced you and said, "He's the best comedian in the world." And you did your set, and it must have never left your brain because the second you got off stage, you found me and said, "Don't put pressure on a person like that. You don't say that when you bring somebody on stage. It's a stupid thing." It must have been the whole act.

You're thinking that, "Fuckin' kid, fuckin' kid." I know, but Tom Papa did the same thing to me about 3 months ago.

Yeah.

And I went Night in the Toilet at a benefit.

You know, it was dumb.

The audience just went, oh really?

I know.

And it was over.

I was 19 years old. But anyway, so you could— It's an innocent mistake. You were me. But anyway, but then he invited me to do a bunch of shows with him. So we did some big theaters. And I had never done big theaters. And people applaud jokes in big theaters. Or they did then. Applause breaks were such an '80s thing. And so I'm opening for Jerry in front of like 1,200 or 2,500 people, and people are applauding bits, and I had never encountered that, and I didn't know how to handle it. Just standing there waiting for people to stop applauding. I know, yeah. And do I bow, or do I say thank you? So I asked Jerry what to do, and he said, you stay in the bit. You stay in the bit that they're reacting to. You don't go, "Hey, people are applauding." If you're angry and that's why they're applauding, you stay in that energy. Or if you're perplexed, you stay, you keep, and then by the way, it lengthens, it keeps them excited about it and it keeps them, and that changed a lot for me. It made me think more about the way I was being as a person. I remember one time I was with a friend of mine who lives in New York also, and we went to pick up his cousin. She lives on a farm in New Hampshire, her family was this weird family. They kept their kids on a farm. Anyway, her parents finally died, so she got to leave, and so she came down to visit her cousin, my friend, in the city, and so we picked her up at Port Authority bus station. She had never been to any city before, and we're picking her up at the Port Authority, that smelly hole of a place, and we pick her up there, and she's just freaking out at New York. She's never seen anything like it. And we passed this homeless guy, and she sees him. I mean, we all passed him, but she saw him. She's the only one who actually saw him. We didn't. Me and her cousin were like, "So? He's supposed to be there. So what? There's a perfectly good reason why that's not me and it's him. The right people always win. I'm sure of it." But so there he is. And this dude was particularly homeless. He was one of those high-octane homeless, smelly, just piss smell, the unbelievable piss smell. Just so he was pissed. He didn't just smell like this. He was— when you piss, he comes out. That's what— that's how much.

It's just this dude with garbage all over.

I don't know if he had gathered it for warmth or folks just went, "Ugh," all day. And he had dreadlocks. Not hacky sack, cool guy, medical marijuana dreadlocks, just human neglect clumps of hair. A clump of hair for every year that no one knew his name or cared. Yeah, that's who you've been laughing at for the last 10 minutes. That's how bad it was.

And again, me and my friend were just like, meh.

His cousin immediately just gets— she's like, "Oh my God." She takes a knee. That's how— I mean, I'm not even taking a real knee now. That's how little I give a shit about the guy. He's not even here and I'm still like, "Eh, eh, it's close enough." She goes, "Oh my God, sir, are you okay?

What happened?" What happened? America happened.

What do you mean, what happened?

So she's down there, "Sir, can we call someone?" And me and my friend, we're from New York, this is the crazy part, we immediately go to her, "Oh no, no, no, honey, don't—" We start correcting her behavior like she's doing something wrong.

She's like, "Why, is he okay?" "No, no, he needs you desperately. That's not the point. We just don't do that here." You silly country girl.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Arlington Guitarist asked me to. If there's someone you'd like me to profile in a future top 10, please check out the link down in the description below and you can cast your vote on who we should do next. I also want to give a quick shout out to Don Robertson. Don, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and posting that awesome picture with the camping gear to Twitter. I think it's great. Great camping reading. I hope you had a fantastic camping trip and learned some new things about yourself and are applying some of the lessons inside. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much again for sharing. I really appreciate your support. Thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.

When I started, I just devoured comedy. I went to clubs every night, even if I wasn't— I'd be on stage maybe twice a week, but I was at clubs 7 nights a week. I'd watch every comedian I could, good or bad, friend or foe, didn't matter. I just watched and just loaded it into my system as a—

Oh, I'm the same way about interview. I mean, just watch, see how they do it. Are they doing— if you're in London, watch everybody you can see.

Right.

Are they doing it different Is there a style that's interesting? Yeah. Because in the end, you have to be yourself. You have to find your own sense. But there's always something to learn about the approach that somebody makes, whether it's a baseball player watching another baseball player.

Right, because a baseball player is watching another player, but he's watching baseball. He's watching this— they're all doing the same game, you know? So the game is— so the same in stand-up. Whatever the comic is doing is not in a vacuum. You're watching stand-up happen. You're watching how audiences are reacting. And the audience is such a mysterious animal. Animal to us, you know. So you're always kept guessing. There's some nights you go to a club and you're like, you know, I feel good, I'm ready to do— have a good show, but the audience has a strange, unanimous, uh, grumpy feeling to them or something. And how did all these people— they're all strangers to each other, but they've— they're all sitting there, we hate this show. Like, how is this happening?

How is it some common response?

Yeah. So I'll never see enough shows to go, okay, I get this. Yeah, you know. So it's an unquenchable thirst. How important is it to make things with people you genuinely enjoy being around? That's really— it's very important. When you've been doing this for a while, there's this thing that I've been in a lot of meetings, like casting meetings or meetings where we're trying to decide who's going to take what role in a project. And you name all these terrific, talented people, and there's somebody in the room always that goes, life's too short. Life's too short, you know, so, you know, oh, what about, you know, somebody, Academy Award winner, blah, blah, blah. Somebody who works with them goes, life's too short. So as good as they might be, we're not going to spend a frickin' month with this person. So, I mean, I still have energy to spend time with shit people if they'll do good work. I really will. I've done that before. I've done things with people that like were a wall-to-wall nightmare. Yeah, and I'm really proud of the work that we did together. Yeah, and I would do it again. It's fun. It's kind of like, uh, you know, an animal that you have to wrangle. Yeah, they just sort of, whoa, hey now, hey, and they tear up. You get a little scars, but they heal. They heal. That's exactly it. That's right. The distress from working with people heals, and if they leave behind good footage, uh, it was worth it.

I mean, everything that we introduce to the world as shit, meaning white people. Because I really think that white people are from another planet. Because when we came to America, it was so nice. It was just Indians. And they weren't even Indians. We called them that by accident. And we still call them that. We knew in a month that it wasn't Indians. But we just don't give a shit. We never correct it. We came here.

They were like, "Hi." And we're like, "Hey, you're Indians, right?" And they're like, "No." "No, this is India, right?" "No, it's not.

It's a totally other place." "You're not Indians?" "No." "Ah, you're Indians." You're Indians for hundreds of years after. We ruined everything here. This was the great— it was just coast to coast, just green, brown, and beautiful. And all the humans were just walking around with painted faces, just walking. And they'd be like, ooh, that looks yummy. And then they'd just eat from the ground. And then they'd sleep on the grass. And they'd wake up, and they'd fuck. And then they'd go for a swim and do a little dance. That was the whole continent was just folks doing that. That. I mean, there's people in Mexico cutting off kids' heads and rolling them down the pyramid stairs. But that's— I mean, that's always going on.

What are you going to— you can't do a whole lot about that. But I think we came from another planet.

And the reason is because we don't like it here. I mean, why— if we're from here, if we belong on Earth, Why aren't we comfortable on Earth at all? We need nice smooth surfaces and right angles. And we need it to be cool and not too hot, just a little, just perfect. Like, why wouldn't— when it's hot, why wouldn't we just, yeah, frick it? Why wouldn't we be like that if we belong here? And it's weird because people that are— whatever you call the— there's environmentalists, and then there's people who are whatever.

They just hate environmentalists.

But that's what people get angry at environmentalists because they think they're slowing down the economy and creating restrictions.

And a lot of these people are Christian. A lot of these people are very devout Christians.

And that's such a confusing thing to me, that if you believe that God gave you the Earth, that God created the Earth for you, why would you not have to look after it? Why the fuck? Why would you not think that when he came back, he wouldn't go, what the fuck did you do? I gave this to you, motherfucker. Are you crazy? The polar bears are brown. What did you do to the polar bears? Did you shit all over every polar bear? What did you— who did this? Who spilled this shit? Who spilled this? Come over. Did you spill this? What is that? It's oil.

It's just some oil.

I didn't mean to spill. Well, why didn't you take it out of the rounds? Because I wanted to go faster. I'm not fast enough. And I was cold. What the fuck do you mean cold? I gave you everything you needed, you piece of shit.

Well, because jobs.

I want to— what is a job? What is—

explain to me.

What's a fucking job? You go— like, you work at a place.

And when people call when their game doesn't work, and you help them figure it out.

What do you do that for? For money. What do you need money for? Food. Just eat the shit on the floor. I left shit all over the floor. Fucking corn and wheat and shit. Grab it up. Make some bread.

What are you doing? Yeah, but it doesn't have like bacon around it and like, I like when it has like bacon on it and—