Louis C.K. will get a warm welcome back into mainstream culture on Friday night when he sits down for a one-on-one interview on Real Time with Bill Maher—his first TV appearance in more than eight years after he was exposed as a sexual predator.
HBO announced the booking on Thursday, which comes just as C.K. is returning from his gig as one of the headliners at the controversial Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia. Comedians including Marc Maron and David Cross have strongly criticized anyone who would take money from the Saudi government as complicit in that regime’s human rights abuses.
C.K. became the face of both the #MeToo movement and “cancel culture” when he was accused by five different women in Oct. 2017 of masturbating in front of them against their will.
“These stories are true,” the comedian said in a statement at the time, adding, “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”
But while C.K. has continued to perform comedy in the years since—and even won a Grammy Award in 2022 for Best Comedy Album—he has remained mostly absent from the mainstream comedy world. While he once had specials on HBO and Netflix, he has since self-produced and released his own comedy specials and made just a handful of promotional appearances on manosphere podcasts with Andrew Schulz, Theo Von, Joe Rogan and a few others.
Before he was “canceled” C.K. was a regular fixture on late-night TV, appearing on Conan O’Brien’s various shows a total of 33 times and hosting Saturday Night Live four times (including in the spring of 2017). His last late-night interview also came in April of that year with Stephen Colbert.
Especially since Trump was re-elected, however, C.K. has been slowly welcomed back into the entertainment industry. That includes three big shows at the Beacon Theatre next month as part of the New York Comedy Festival and the release of a new novel, which he will be promoting on Maher’s show this week.
In his social media rant against the Riyadh festival, David Cross singled out C.K. (along with Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr) as one of his comedy “heroes.” After deciding to take a huge paycheck to play that festival, however, Cross wrote, “All of your b—hing about ‘cancel culture’ and ‘freedom of speech’ and all that s–t? Done. You don’t get to talk about it ever again.”
The issue—a personal obsession for Maher—seems almost certain to come up during their talk Friday night.
The post Bill Maher Gives Louis C.K. First TV Interview in 8 Years appeared first on The Daily Beast.
