Things can get a little crazy when it comes to live TV. Things can also get crazy pretty much anytime Louis C.K. is involved. It turns out the man who closed out Saturday Night Live’s 40th Season on NBC this year has a history of butting heads with producer Lorne Michaels over his monologues. Before he went after every offensive topic in the book, he just talked to damn much.
Uproxx has the story, which comes from Judd Apatow’s new book of interviews with comedians Sick in the Head. In it, Louis C.K. relates a story that when he hosted the show back in 2014, he and Michaels got into an argument over the length of the monologue. During rehearsal Louis C.K’s opening clocked in at 12 minutes, and Louis wanted to perform the entire thing for the live show. Michaels was having none of it and wanted Louis to cut five minutes out of the set. He didn’t think that all 12 minutes were quite as golden and C.K. apparently did. This led to some heated four letter words from the stand-up comic, though he did go back and work on editing it down to the requested length. But, due to the time constraints of dealing with a live scheduled broadcast, they were apparently dangerously close to the wire before it was done. The final product, which was raised to eight minutes after it turned out that the show was running 60 seconds short, turned out pretty well overall, at least in our opinion.
Apparently it worked out in the long run as C.K. returned this year for the show’s season finale. In that case he came up against criticism again, although this time it was much more focused on the content rather than duration. His monologue dealt with a number of controversial topics including racism and child molestation. You know, those old chestnuts. While many weren’t laughing at the choice of topics, Saturday Night Live is obviously still going strong after 40 years as we’re still talking about it.
SNL will be back for Season 41 in the fall. Whether Louis C.K’s FX series, Louie will be back for Season 6 is still unknown at this point. You can hear, but not see Louis in the new trailer for the animated film The Secret Life of Pets that will be out next year.
