Chris DeLine

Spoilers are kind of silly when it comes to discussing Louis CK‘s Louie: Even if someone was to tell you the exact breakdown of an episode, chances are that it would still hold an entirely different value to you once you watched it. Such is the case with season two’s second episode, titled “Bummer/Blueberries.”

Despite its absurd plot twists this show, or rather this episode, is less about what happens to Louie and more about what’s happening. It’s easy to grab onto the main plot points — like Louie’s witness of a decapitation, his awkward date, or his even awkward-er hook-up — but there’s an unusual connection that winds its way through the entire episode which reveals it as an oddity (an oddity, even by Louis CK’s standards).

In his opening Seinfeldian standup monologue sequence, Louie riffs on his distaste for his own body and his increasingly discomfort with his gut — made worse every time he sleeps with a woman. In the end though, his bit is more about learning to live with his inadequacies than changing them; something which we’re all known to do.

Once in the heart of the show, after witnessing the horrific death of a homeless person, Louie still heads off to a movie-date he’d awkwardly made the night before, over the phone, nervously stuttering like a child and all. But once he arrives, he’s so overcome with emotion by what he’s just seen that he can’t begin to take part in the tedious nonsense of a movie, so he tells his date he needs to take a walk. She follows.

“We think this is the important place — like we live in the center of the goddamn universe. And it’s bullshit; it’s meaningless.” So shook up by what he’d seen, Louie invites his date into the moment where they briefly share a connection and a kiss before she ultimately learns about why he’s rambling on in the first place. She freaks.

Later, Louie has an awkward “no-strings-attached” (yet ultimately soul-numbing) hook-up with a woman who is a parent of a kid in his daughter’s class: Awkward granny nightgown, vagina cream, daddy issues, crying, the works. But he still goes with it, and not just because it’s sex, but because even as bizarre as it is, that’s an increasingly neutral zone in our increasingly warped lives.

The reason we’re ultimately okay with our sagging sweaty sex guts is the same reason we’re okay with rambling about how society’s values are all mixed up with someone we don’t really know is the same reason that we’re okay with slapping a stranger’s ass as they call us daddy and breakdown crying. For many people, this episode of Louie is what the human experience has become. And for the rest, that decapitated homeless man will sure make a hell of a water cooler story at work tomorrow.

Now, where’s that pint of Häagen-Dazs when you need it?

[This post was first published by Culture Bully.]