Louis C.K. is back with a new comedy special release, Live at Madison Square Garden. As always, Louie is self-distributing it on his website, LouisCK.net. Typically, Louie charges five bucks for fans to download and save his audio and video comedy specials in popular file formats. This time around, though, he’s playing around with his groundbreaking and fool-proof system: he’s letting you decide how much you want to pay for it. The default price is set at $5, but you can lower that to a buck or raise it all the way to $85–it’s completely up to you. In the past, Louie’s made his specials cheap to get online to curb pirating. Wondering why he makes the barrier to entry even lower for the MSG special?
On his site Louie writes, “Price: so I didn’t know what to charge for this because a lot of the material was on my Comedy Store special and it was hard to get good sound because comedy is intimate and MSG is large, so there’s a lot of sound slapping around everywhere though the sound engineer and the mixer did their level best. So we have the price set to 5 dollars but you can lower it to 1 dollar or raise it to 85. that’s the maximum, because beyond that, I don’t want your crazy money. Not for this show.”
The comedian even went on The Daily Show last week (on Jon Stewart’s penultimate episode) to tell fans not to buy it in classic Louie self-deprecating humor. “It didn’t seem fair to really sell it,” he semi-jokingly told Stewart.
Repeated material and fuzzy mixing aside, Live at Madison Square Garden does contain new jokes, and if you’re into Louie’s smart, dirty humor then giving away a lousy buck to hear them sounds more than fair to me.
Jump after the break to learn the future of Louie’s FX original series.
In related news, FX head John Landgraf made a major announcement at the Television Critics Association last week in Beverly Hills in regards to the future of Louie. The critically acclaimed dark-ish comedy is going on another extended hiatus for an undetermined amount of time. Landgraf made it clear that he wants Louie’s show to remain on the air for as long as humanly possible, but he’s leaving it up to the comedian as to when more episodes will see the light of day. HBO does the same thing with Larry David; when the Seinfeld creator feels the creative juices flowing, he approaches the premium cable network about making more Curb You Enthusiasm. It’s that simple. For fans, however, the long wait between seasons can be excruciating.
Of course, Louie won’t be idly getting by. “He is anxious to take a break and wants to focus on other things,” said Landgraf. He’s working on a movie, and he’s producing two new FX comedy series: Better Things starring Pamela Adlon and Baskets with Zach Galifianakis. Louie fans will recognize Adlon’s name; she plays Louie’s friend and love interest in his show. Now she’s about to get her own!