Name: Louis C.K. on "Bad" Words and Freedom of Speech
Uploaded: 2025-10-14T20:15:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Louis C.K. on "Bad" Words and Freedom of Speech' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Louis C.K. on "Bad" Words and Freedom of Speech' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-14. Transcript available.

Yeah, man, I'm excited to see you guys perform tonight.
The Ryman's a beautiful place.
Yeah, do you feel uncomfortable ever saying certain things in such a beautiful
venue?
And not you particularly, but also definitely you.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
The Ryman feels like, I mean, Harry Houdini was there.
Yeah.
And so was Martin Luther King.
And so was Johnny Cash and Elvis.
A pretty good balance of perverts and.
Wizards.
Perverts and wizards.
Yeah.
I think so.
I feel okay.
Yeah.
About talking about bad stuff that you shouldn't talk about.
There's places like a symphony space, you know, when you do like one of those.
Ooh.
Where it's like really hallowed and there's like, you know.
Yeah.
There should be a guy in a tuxedo playing a cello.
Yeah.
There should be like a, like the maitre d' of instruments or whatever that guy's
called.
What's it?
Yeah.
The maitre d' of instruments.
Like a conductor.
The leader.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When you have those guys and then I'm on there and I'm talking about the hair
on the tip of my cock.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
But then again, I sold the tickets.
It's just a bunch of seats.
Yeah.
But it is though, you get into something, you're like, oh, this isn't it.
Or I had to do a church once.
This man invited me.
And I don't want to say he was a pervert or whatever.
Or I don't want to say, I don't want to say he was, he seemed like somebody who
was willing to touch somebody that was probably young.
He's willing to touch somebody who's maybe probably young.
Yeah.
That's borderline.
Okay.
He's willing.
Right.
He was willing to.
I'm not going to say he was.
Right.
If somebody was like, hey, this kid, this kid's dick is bleeding.
Yeah.
Anybody, we all feel kind of weird about applying pressure.
He'd be like, I'm willing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That kind of guy, like a, like an EMT for small cut.
You know, like that, you know what I'm talking about?
Shot his hand up a little too quick on that question.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I just would.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Like having a couple of small tourniquets in his pocket, you know?
He's equipped.
But yeah, so that guy invited me to do a show and it was in like Laughlin,
Nevada or something out in the middle of the desert.
And it was at a church and he was a church man and he, or he was a, like a
pastor, a leader of a church.
We get there and I was like, oh man, this guy had only seen one of my bits and
it was just more of a safe bit.
It just had nothing edgy in it.
Right.
And I got into this stuff and you could see a man get up with his family and
just, I mean, he was leaving the show.
He was leaving the church though, too.
You could see.
Oh no.
I felt horrible.
And it's, I kept looking at him in the back and he's trying to be supportive.
And I was like, don't support me.
I was like, this shouldn't be happening, you know?
And you felt that way?
I did.
You shouldn't have been doing it.
Yeah.
But I couldn't just, all I had was my material.
I could do some real thing, but it's also in a church that was, the lights were
all on.
But yeah, some venues, it's just a little.
Yeah.
It's funny.
I used to be more defiant.
I used to feel more like, you know, hey man, this is what I, you know.
Right.
Fuck you.
But I feel less that way.
I'm not going to change what I do.
Yeah.
But I don't want to upset anybody.
I'm not trying to.
Yeah.
But I'm not as, I'm not as like, we'll show them.
I was talking about something on stage recently and somebody in the, in the
balcony yelled,
ah, Greg, got angry.
And I said, what's wrong?
And this person, I don't remember what the bit was, but they were like, that's
not cool,
man.
And I said, are you, are you offended by what I said?
He said, yeah.
And I just said, I'm really sorry.
Like I had never done that before.
I was just like, I'm really sorry.
Yeah.
Anyway, and I'm going to keep doing it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We got to keep going.
I mean, that's, yeah, you got to keep going.
Yeah.
I did a club in Florida down in Key West.
Oh yeah.
And it's a good, I love the guy who runs it, this guy, Tom, and it's a fun club,
but a
lot of the crowd is like people that are on a cruise and they jump off and they,
they had no context for what I was like getting pure silence on some stuff.
And at some point I just said, listen, I, I just want you to know, I'm not
trying to
upset you.
Oh yeah.
I'm just wanting you to know that this is all, I don't have another way to go.
Right.
This isn't me antagonizing you.
This is just, you and I are very different.
Yeah.
And if you could try to open your heart a little bit, I can't, I'm opening up
to you,
but I can't like invent jokes for you right now.
Wow.
And I, and they are like, okay, okay.
And I could see these sort of old people in pink, pink and coral blue shirts
going, all
right, we'll try a little harder.
Yeah.
Cause at first they just thought, well, he's just, he's, you know, sometimes if
somebody's
upsetting you, you think they want to.
Right.
But sometimes it's just that they're just being what they are.
And if you can know that, I think it helps.
Oh, even as you're saying that, it makes me think like, even when I was a kid,
if my
mom would have every now and then, like, I know I bring that back things to
childhood
all the time, but it's like, or if a parent would every now and be like, Hey, I
know
this is not good.
I know this sucks for you.
Right.
And I know this is everything we're doing here is really, it's a Barnum and
Bailey.
Yeah.
It's a real shit circus.
I've tried to say that to my, but that's all we got.
Like, I don't trust people that will say, like, I think if somebody won't say,
some people
won't, won't say f*****, right?
Or they won't say the F word for about gay folks.
And you know what it is.
Gay Fs.
Huh?
Gay Fs.
Gay Fs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Gay folks.
You mean the folks is the F word, right?
No.
I'm saying.
Yeah.
Some people won't say, and I'll say it really fast because some people don't
like hearing
it.
F*****.
That got right by the people that don't, they weren't, they were doing
something else.
Well, some, yeah.
It's like, you could have looked away.
You could have been driving and looking out of the street before you know it,
it's gone.
But some people will say the N word, but won't say that word.
That's what I don't get.
It's like.
Yeah.
How do you even get?
That you won't say the N word, but you will say the F word or that you won't
say it which
way?
Some people won't say, won't say the F word.
Yeah.
But they'll say the N word.
Really?
Who's that?
What group is that?
That to me is racist.
That's racist.
It's like.
Yeah.
If you have a general sensitivity about like, well, I just don't want to, some
of these words
have gotten too hard to use.
Yeah.
I used to say all of them.
Yeah.
But I don't now because it just has a different effect.
Yeah.
I'm like, you're saying, like you're saying earlier, we, we get older.
Some things just kind of, it lands different.
Sometimes it's different depending on how things are.
Language is a living thing.
Right.
And the way people communicate is always changing.
And, and, and the sounds you make are affected by the other sounds in the air.
Yeah.
So you don't live in a vacuum and it doesn't mean that's not a moral thing to
me.
That's just, do you want to be understood?
Right.
Do you want to, uh, what do you want to convey?
What feeling are you trying to put out there?
Yeah.
And sometimes the N word can be said with a lot of love.
It can also be said with humor or just, um, experimental confusion.
But at a time where, uh, there's like certain things that got tightened up, it
doesn't have
that effect anymore.
So, uh, so make an adjustment.
It's interesting.
I think cause first, and also it's by generation.
It's like some gen, it's like some people may accept a 15 year old half Mexican
kid saying
it, but some people might not accept a 50 year old half Mexican kids.
And, uh, I mean, the word colored was, uh, no way when I was growing up colored
was like
the, that's, but now they say it, but now it's people of color, like things
move around.
When you start censoring, you, you freeze yourself and you're no longer hearing
what's going on
out there.
You know what I mean?
Like you gotta have the flow and, and you, you gotta just trust people to go
like, okay,
let's put N word on the, on the shelf for a while.
And his back colored is respectable.
Now it, it, it moves around.
It's, it's fascinating language.
It's like the most amazing thing about what we do, you know?
Yeah.
You just have such a, I mean, like, I just, you're so good at like, you're like
the guy
who's like, say like your feelings and everything was like a cave or whatever.
And everybody's at the top and they're like, we can't go in there.
You know, and they're, they're not even, there's like one brave Mexican guy who's
like
selling fucking snow cones or something, but not a lot.
At the mouth of the cave?
At the mouth.
Yeah.
But it's close.
It's no abierto.
No abierto.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he says that.
Yeah.
No abierto.
No abierto.
But you want a snow cone?
That's it, right?
He said, look.
Because it's capital.
Cincuenta centavos para un snow cone.
Pero eso no es abierto, amigo.
No pase.
Yeah.
But then you walk up and you have like your fucking spelunking gear and shit.
You're like, who the fuck?
Yeah.
Is this a psychopath?
Yeah.
But you go, but you're like, I'll be back.
And people are like, what?
You can't go in there.
Look at all the signs.
There's like a million signs.
You're like, no, no, no.
I've been in here.
I spent a lot of time in here.
I left something down there.
Yeah.
I left one.
Favorite pack of bubblegum down there.
That's right.
Yeah.
It feels like that.
You're just so good at going in there and like just being in there, man.
But also getting in there and getting in there and like seeing what the like
stalactites are that are hangups in our time or in our feelings, in our
existence, in what it means to evolve like personally.
Like, man, you're just like such a archaeologist of, I don't know what it is.
I don't know if it's emotions or feelings or just of existing kind of.
Well, that's what I love to try to do.
What you're describing is what I try to do.
I've never heard it that way, but that's what it does feel like is bringing
people to these places and going, it's okay.
You can look at this without letting it hurt you or you can let it hurt and you're
going to be okay on the other side.
It's okay.
And having that, and because I've been doing standup for 40 years now, like I'm
very beyond taking it personally.
So if I say something to a crowd and I feel them resist, I don't take, I don't
go like, oh, they don't like me now.
That's one of the problems of being a standup is you're so exposed personally.
So if they don't like something, you feel like you take it on.
Yeah.
But I'm okay with any outcome.
Like they're all okay.
So if I say something and people just go, what?
I go, cool.
Now we're here.
Right.
Now we're here that you're weirded out.
There's a bunch of places we can go from here because I see it all as okay.
I think I see every feeling is worth, worth having.
Um, especially if you don't like, I kind of came up with this new idea in my
life recently, which is that your feelings are like fire and you warm yourself
by them.
You sit by the fire of the feeling you don't get in it and let it burn you, but
you also don't go away because it's, it's hot.
You don't go away from it and then you're cold out there and there's no light.
Just sit and just let it, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
So I'm trying to get better at that.
I think a lot of early in life, I was more brutal about like, yeah, look at
this shit.
This is fucked up.
Look at this shit.
Yeah.
And that's, it's, that's just kind of messy, but I'm trying to get a little
more refined at taking people to hard things to talk about and going like, just,
let's just sit next to this for a second.
And how does it feel to be next to this?
You know?
Yeah.
What are we doing here?
Get used to it.
Yeah, because, uh, every experience in life, certainly feelings are, I think
feeling is living.
You know, I used to think thinking was more or learning, but I think feeling
when people really feel they're right on there, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Feelings are never wrong.
They're, uh.
Ooh, yeah.
They're pretty pure, huh?
They are.
Even if they're, even if the, you may not agree with somebody's feeling or
something.
Yeah.
It's interesting to see why they have it, if you believe that it's pure from
them.
Well, it also goes back to that lady's quote, to Flannery O'Connor's quote.
I mean, that's more like about feeling in there.
Yeah.
I finally saw the, the, the world and it was unbearable.
And, uh, and it is, especially when you first really see it.
Thank you.

Louis C.K. on "Bad" Words and Freedom of Speech

Yeah, man, I'm excited to see you guys perform tonight.
The Ryman's a beautiful place.
Yeah, do you feel uncomfortable ever saying certain things in such a beautiful
venue?
And not you particularly, but also definitely you.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
The Ryman feels like, I mean, Harry Houdini was there.
Yeah.
And so was Martin Luther King.
And so was Johnny Cash and Elvis.
A pretty good balance of perverts and.
Wizards.
Perverts and wizards.
Yeah.
I think so.
I feel okay.
Yeah.
About talking about bad stuff that you shouldn't talk about.
There's places like a symphony space, you know, when you do like one of those.
Ooh.
Where it's like really hallowed and there's like, you know.
Yeah.
There should be a guy in a tuxedo playing a cello.
Yeah.
There should be like a, like the maitre d' of instruments or whatever that guy's
called.
What's it?
Yeah.
The maitre d' of instruments.
Like a conductor.
The leader.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When you have those guys and then I'm on there and I'm talking about the hair
on the tip of my cock.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
But then again, I sold the tickets.
It's just a bunch of seats.
Yeah.
But it is though, you get into something, you're like, oh, this isn't it.
Or I had to do a church once.
This man invited me.
And I don't want to say he was a pervert or whatever.
Or I don't want to say, I don't want to say he was, he seemed like somebody who
was willing to touch somebody that was probably young.
He's willing to touch somebody who's maybe probably young.
Yeah.
That's borderline.
Okay.
He's willing.
Right.
He was willing to.
I'm not going to say he was.
Right.
If somebody was like, hey, this kid, this kid's dick is bleeding.
Yeah.
Anybody, we all feel kind of weird about applying pressure.
He'd be like, I'm willing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That kind of guy, like a, like an EMT for small cut.
You know, like that, you know what I'm talking about?
Shot his hand up a little too quick on that question.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I just would.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Like having a couple of small tourniquets in his pocket, you know?
He's equipped.
But yeah, so that guy invited me to do a show and it was in like Laughlin,
Nevada or something out in the middle of the desert.
And it was at a church and he was a church man and he, or he was a, like a
pastor, a leader of a church.
We get there and I was like, oh man, this guy had only seen one of my bits and
it was just more of a safe bit.
It just had nothing edgy in it.
Right.
And I got into this stuff and you could see a man get up with his family and
just, I mean, he was leaving the show.
He was leaving the church though, too.
You could see.
Oh no.
I felt horrible.
And it's, I kept looking at him in the back and he's trying to be supportive.
And I was like, don't support me.
I was like, this shouldn't be happening, you know?
And you felt that way?
I did.
You shouldn't have been doing it.
Yeah.
But I couldn't just, all I had was my material.
I could do some real thing, but it's also in a church that was, the lights were
all on.
But yeah, some venues, it's just a little.
Yeah.
It's funny.
I used to be more defiant.
I used to feel more like, you know, hey man, this is what I, you know.
Right.
Fuck you.
But I feel less that way.
I'm not going to change what I do.
Yeah.
But I don't want to upset anybody.
I'm not trying to.
Yeah.
But I'm not as, I'm not as like, we'll show them.
I was talking about something on stage recently and somebody in the, in the
balcony yelled,
ah, Greg, got angry.
And I said, what's wrong?
And this person, I don't remember what the bit was, but they were like, that's
not cool,
man.
And I said, are you, are you offended by what I said?
He said, yeah.
And I just said, I'm really sorry.
Like I had never done that before.
I was just like, I'm really sorry.
Yeah.
Anyway, and I'm going to keep doing it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We got to keep going.
I mean, that's, yeah, you got to keep going.
Yeah.
I did a club in Florida down in Key West.
Oh yeah.
And it's a good, I love the guy who runs it, this guy, Tom, and it's a fun club,
but a
lot of the crowd is like people that are on a cruise and they jump off and they,
they had no context for what I was like getting pure silence on some stuff.
And at some point I just said, listen, I, I just want you to know, I'm not
trying to
upset you.
Oh yeah.
I'm just wanting you to know that this is all, I don't have another way to go.
Right.
This isn't me antagonizing you.
This is just, you and I are very different.
Yeah.
And if you could try to open your heart a little bit, I can't, I'm opening up
to you,
but I can't like invent jokes for you right now.
Wow.
And I, and they are like, okay, okay.
And I could see these sort of old people in pink, pink and coral blue shirts
going, all
right, we'll try a little harder.
Yeah.
Cause at first they just thought, well, he's just, he's, you know, sometimes if
somebody's
upsetting you, you think they want to.
Right.
But sometimes it's just that they're just being what they are.
And if you can know that, I think it helps.
Oh, even as you're saying that, it makes me think like, even when I was a kid,
if my
mom would have every now and then, like, I know I bring that back things to
childhood
all the time, but it's like, or if a parent would every now and be like, Hey, I
know
this is not good.
I know this sucks for you.
Right.
And I know this is everything we're doing here is really, it's a Barnum and
Bailey.
Yeah.
It's a real shit circus.
I've tried to say that to my, but that's all we got.
Like, I don't trust people that will say, like, I think if somebody won't say,
some people
won't, won't say f*****, right?
Or they won't say the F word for about gay folks.
And you know what it is.
Gay Fs.
Huh?
Gay Fs.
Gay Fs.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Gay folks.
You mean the folks is the F word, right?
No.
I'm saying.
Yeah.
Some people won't say, and I'll say it really fast because some people don't
like hearing
it.
F*****.
That got right by the people that don't, they weren't, they were doing
something else.
Well, some, yeah.
It's like, you could have looked away.
You could have been driving and looking out of the street before you know it,
it's gone.
But some people will say the N word, but won't say that word.
That's what I don't get.
It's like.
Yeah.
How do you even get?
That you won't say the N word, but you will say the F word or that you won't
say it which
way?
Some people won't say, won't say the F word.
Yeah.
But they'll say the N word.
Really?
Who's that?
What group is that?
That to me is racist.
That's racist.
It's like.
Yeah.
If you have a general sensitivity about like, well, I just don't want to, some
of these words
have gotten too hard to use.
Yeah.
I used to say all of them.
Yeah.
But I don't now because it just has a different effect.
Yeah.
I'm like, you're saying, like you're saying earlier, we, we get older.
Some things just kind of, it lands different.
Sometimes it's different depending on how things are.
Language is a living thing.
Right.
And the way people communicate is always changing.
And, and, and the sounds you make are affected by the other sounds in the air.
Yeah.
So you don't live in a vacuum and it doesn't mean that's not a moral thing to
me.
That's just, do you want to be understood?
Right.
Do you want to, uh, what do you want to convey?
What feeling are you trying to put out there?
Yeah.
And sometimes the N word can be said with a lot of love.
It can also be said with humor or just, um, experimental confusion.
But at a time where, uh, there's like certain things that got tightened up, it
doesn't have
that effect anymore.
So, uh, so make an adjustment.
It's interesting.
I think cause first, and also it's by generation.
It's like some gen, it's like some people may accept a 15 year old half Mexican
kid saying
it, but some people might not accept a 50 year old half Mexican kids.
And, uh, I mean, the word colored was, uh, no way when I was growing up colored
was like
the, that's, but now they say it, but now it's people of color, like things
move around.
When you start censoring, you, you freeze yourself and you're no longer hearing
what's going on
out there.
You know what I mean?
Like you gotta have the flow and, and you, you gotta just trust people to go
like, okay,
let's put N word on the, on the shelf for a while.
And his back colored is respectable.
Now it, it, it moves around.
It's, it's fascinating language.
It's like the most amazing thing about what we do, you know?
Yeah.
You just have such a, I mean, like, I just, you're so good at like, you're like
the guy
who's like, say like your feelings and everything was like a cave or whatever.
And everybody's at the top and they're like, we can't go in there.
You know, and they're, they're not even, there's like one brave Mexican guy who's
like
selling fucking snow cones or something, but not a lot.
At the mouth of the cave?
At the mouth.
Yeah.
But it's close.
It's no abierto.
No abierto.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he says that.
Yeah.
No abierto.
No abierto.
But you want a snow cone?
That's it, right?
He said, look.
Because it's capital.
Cincuenta centavos para un snow cone.
Pero eso no es abierto, amigo.
No pase.
Yeah.
But then you walk up and you have like your fucking spelunking gear and shit.
You're like, who the fuck?
Yeah.
Is this a psychopath?
Yeah.
But you go, but you're like, I'll be back.
And people are like, what?
You can't go in there.
Look at all the signs.
There's like a million signs.
You're like, no, no, no.
I've been in here.
I spent a lot of time in here.
I left something down there.
Yeah.
I left one.
Favorite pack of bubblegum down there.
That's right.
Yeah.
It feels like that.
You're just so good at going in there and like just being in there, man.
But also getting in there and getting in there and like seeing what the like
stalactites are that are hangups in our time or in our feelings, in our
existence, in what it means to evolve like personally.
Like, man, you're just like such a archaeologist of, I don't know what it is.
I don't know if it's emotions or feelings or just of existing kind of.
Well, that's what I love to try to do.
What you're describing is what I try to do.
I've never heard it that way, but that's what it does feel like is bringing
people to these places and going, it's okay.
You can look at this without letting it hurt you or you can let it hurt and you're
going to be okay on the other side.
It's okay.
And having that, and because I've been doing standup for 40 years now, like I'm
very beyond taking it personally.
So if I say something to a crowd and I feel them resist, I don't take, I don't
go like, oh, they don't like me now.
That's one of the problems of being a standup is you're so exposed personally.
So if they don't like something, you feel like you take it on.
Yeah.
But I'm okay with any outcome.
Like they're all okay.
So if I say something and people just go, what?
I go, cool.
Now we're here.
Right.
Now we're here that you're weirded out.
There's a bunch of places we can go from here because I see it all as okay.
I think I see every feeling is worth, worth having.
Um, especially if you don't like, I kind of came up with this new idea in my
life recently, which is that your feelings are like fire and you warm yourself
by them.
You sit by the fire of the feeling you don't get in it and let it burn you, but
you also don't go away because it's, it's hot.
You don't go away from it and then you're cold out there and there's no light.
Just sit and just let it, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
So I'm trying to get better at that.
I think a lot of early in life, I was more brutal about like, yeah, look at
this shit.
This is fucked up.
Look at this shit.
Yeah.
And that's, it's, that's just kind of messy, but I'm trying to get a little
more refined at taking people to hard things to talk about and going like, just,
let's just sit next to this for a second.
And how does it feel to be next to this?
You know?
Yeah.
What are we doing here?
