Louis C.K. On His Concert Film Debut, Dane Cook, and the Joys of Gay Sex

How pissed off were you about the whole Dane Cook thing?

I never really cared that much. When I first heard it, it pissed me off for a very unfair reason, which is I just didn't like the dude. He just bummed me out aesthetically. He had bumped me at a lot of clubs.

Bumped you out of your slot?

Like Laugh Factory in L.A., that's his club. So they'd invite me to do a show, and then he'd come in and say, "I want to go on before Louie," and then he'd go on before me, and do 45 minutes to an hour. It's a basic rude thing that some comedians do.

And he takes your material.

Well, I didn't know he was doing that at the time. And then I saw he did these three bits that were a lot like mine, and I said something about it on a website, and people got so fascinated by it that they've been talking about it now for f*cking five years, and I never thought it was worth all that. And also, whenever you accuse somebody of a crime, when the big heat lamp of the world goes on it and you see them start to suffer from the accusation, it makes you take a hard look at the accusation and go, "Am I sure of this?" And I'm not sure he stole it. I don't know that.

Did he ever talk to you about it?

Yeah, we exchanged emails about it. And we're on whatever, non-terms, but we're friendly whenever we see each other. He has two arguments -- he's had to defend himself crazily about it. One is, there's only a few premises out there, so nobody could be accused of stealing. And I know he doesn't believe that, because he's accused people of stealing a lot himself. He's really aggressive about that. And the other thing he says though is defendable, which is he has released hours of material, and he's accused of stealing three bits. How does that make any sense? So we're saying he's an original writer for everything but three bits? That's a hard position to take about a person. I think it's possible he might have seen these bits and absorbed them, and not known that he took them from me. I worry about that myself sometimes. It's hard to know where your thoughts come from, especially when you have a thirst for material because you need it professionally. He has an enormous need for material because he gets a lot of opportunities. That tends to happen. Nobody's perfect. Hopefully I don't do it.

What can we expect from your new show on FX?

It's a half-hour show shot with even better lenses [than we used in Hilarious]. I wanted to shoot it like a movie, and make them like short films. They're all autobiographical to some degree, but some feel like sketches. Every show is different -- some have two stories, some just one.

Are they loosely scripted and improvised?

All scripted and carefully shot like a movie. It's not like Curb Your Enthusiasm. And I use stand-up to patch the bits together a little bit. It's funny. That's the goal.

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