In chronological order as they appear in Jonah Weiner’s complete transcript from his Rolling Stone interview with Louis.
JW: Were your parents funny?
LCK: No.
“There was also a scene where a girl is egging you on to masturbate, she’s on this chair going, ‘Come on, come on,’ and right at the point where you’re supposed to cum, somebody threw a bucket of cum on her, as if she was the size of herself on the screen, and she just was drenched in whatever they pretended was cum. She laughed a little, she turned her face away and you could see her shaking, you could tell she was laughing. You’re supposed to think you’re going to cum that much.â€
“I’ve always benefited from knowing machines well, because it’s freedom, it gives you freedom, I always knew that.â€
“The thing I tell people if they want to do this, and I don’t give people advice much about it, but it’s to not bring your friends the first time. I’ve seen that a million times: People come in and have 50 people there for them, and their friends laugh and cheer them on, and you see their face get red and excited, and the next time they don’t come in with their friends, and they’re fucking doomed. You need to enter stand-up with that cold slap in the face, or you’ll never really understand what you’re doing.â€
“Oh god, I dropped more acid than I remember in eighth grade.â€
“And an old teacher of mine got me an interview at NYU film school, and I brought all these videos I’d made, and photographs, a portfolio – I’d gotten into photography and stuff, and they said that they would accept me to go to film school. So I quit my job with that in mind, and I’d been doing stand-up, but not well or successfully, and then I never filled in – I got these forms from this guy to fill in, on the floor of my apartment somewhere, but I couldn’t get my brain to…I was supposed to go back to my high school and get my transcripts, and the idea of doing all that, just that paperwork – going to NYU film school was this dream come true for me, but I couldn’t fill out the thing, couldn’t fill it out and go to the Xerox machine and put a stamp on an envelope, all that stuff. It made me want to vomit….So I decided, ‘Fuck it, I’m a comedian. I’m just going to do that, I’m going to stay in Boston.’â€
“I got the feeling, and I never worked at Saturday Night Live, but there was an abusive nature there, there’s a culture of abuse, or there was then, I think maybe it’s different now, but people were really hurting a lot that came from there, and Smigel and Conan had sort of escaped, and they seemed like they were victims of the abuse, but there was this thing where you had to stay until four in the morning.â€
“For a while people really got off on comedy writing, watching the way shows were structured, and that show, Community, I haven’t really seen it very much, but what I hear about it is that people really like the way it deconstructs the form of sitcoms and is playful with it, and that’s really turning people on, and I just don’t know anything about it, I haven seen it and I don’t have the same…everything, especially television, is shaped by what else is on and what’s been on. So that’s what that’s about, people are on a sort of diet right now, and Community gave them a brand new contextually interesting thing to like. I think that’s awesome.â€
“Then you build a third act that just is the train wreck of not really much fun, but it pays everything off, it leaves everybody feeling exactly the same way they left, that they felt before the show started. That’s what shows are meant to do, is leave on par and leave a few jokes behind, to be printed in Entertainment Weekly’s sound bites.â€
“If you study something and you find all this stuff about it, you just went skin deep, so if you keep going and going, you should be left with a fucking mess of unanswered questions.â€