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As we learned earlier this week, Louis CK is trying to make a “comeback” roughly nine months after he admitted to sexually harassing multiple women. The harassment was towards coworkers and fellow comedians, and while Louis CK did admit to some of it, there really hasn’t been a reckoning over his campaign to shut down and gaslight his victims for years. It wasn’t just him – it often felt like (and still feels like) the bro-centric world of comedy has always had Louis’s back and those dudes are all too eager to “give him another chance.” The New York Times would have us believe that Louis CK was embraced completely by the audience at the Comedy Cellar, but they were wrong. Vulture spoke to some of the women who were in the audience, and they had a completely different read on the situation:

Two women who sat through C.K.’s set told Vulture that though the small venue’s audience was overwhelmingly supportive of the comedian, one joke about rape whistles was “uncomfortable,” and that there seemed to be a divide between how men and women reacted to C.K.’s presence.

The women were at the Comedy Cellar that night to see another comedian on the lineup when C.K. appeared onstage after a brief introduction from the night’s emcee. “It felt like he was being thrust upon the audience without telling them,” one woman, who asked to remain anonymous, told Vulture. “The audience was very loud when Louis C.K. walked in. They were clearly supportive and surprised when he showed up, but there were a number of women sitting in the front row,” the woman said. From her seat to the left of the stage, she could see a pair of women sitting stone-faced. Her friend, who asked be identified with the initials S.B., noticed the same reaction: “There were at least four to five females that I could see, and three or four of them were not having it. They were just looking at him, deadpan, straight, not having it.”

S.B. said the audience was mostly white, with lots of couples. Both women say the set was awkward, but the first woman was particularly upset by it. “It was an all-male set to begin with. Then, it’s sort of exacerbated by [C.K.’s] presence,” she said. “If someone had heckled him, I think they would’ve been heckled out. It felt like there were a lot of aggressive men in the audience and very quiet women. It’s the kind of vibe that doesn’t allow for a dissenting voice. You’re just expected to be a good audience member. You’re considered a bad sport if you speak out.”

After C.K.’s set, Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman said the comedian showed up unannounced, and he didn’t know about the surprise set until later. Dworman told The Hollywood Reporter that he’d only received one email complaining about C.K.’s set, but that the comedian received “a real ovation,” according to audio he heard after the fact. The women agree that C.K.’s reception was warm, with one man shouting that it was “good to have [C.K.] back.” S.B. recalled that the applause at the end of C.K.’s set was a bit quieter than the beginning. “I was actually surprised personally how his exit round of applause compared to his entrance round of applause,” she said. “It was way quieter for sure. There was a huge difference in that volume or in those number of claps.”

The women say C.K.’s set was similar to his usual material, and included a joke about the phrase “clean as a whistle,” which built up to a joke about how rape whistles are not clean. “When he said ‘rape whistle’ people were laughing, and I was just sitting there like oh my f–k. This is so uncomfortable and so disgusting. Everyone around me was laughing. That was just depressing.”

[From Vulture]

Towards the end of the piece, it was just driven home how Louis CK’s set was so much like his admitted sexual misconduct/abuse: he wasn’t invited to whip it out, it was really gross and uncomfortable, and women were made to feel like they couldn’t speak about how uncomfortable it really was. And then afterwards, all of the dudes just started gaslighting women about how NO ONE had any problems with it and EVERYONE should be so grateful that it happened. Ugh, I’m going back to bed.

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