Louis Katz is Probably Morally Reprehensible: An Interview

Image from Comedy Central

Louis Katz tells dirty jokes for smart people. Or smart jokes for dirty people; take your pick. He’s like your grad student friend who blows all his student loan money on Rubenesque strippers. And uses “Rubenesque” in everyday conversation. His credits include appearances on NBC’s Last Call with Carson Daly Comedy Central’s Live at Gotham, Jamie Foxx’s America’s Funniest Comics, and HBO’s Down & Dirty with Jim Norton. He also has a half-hour Comedy Central Presents special, and recently released his debut comedy album, If These Balls Could Talk. We chatted up Katz by way of bad internet phone line to discuss BBWs, time-traveling pimps and real-life David Lynch moments.

You had a couple of jokes on Johnny Carson when you were nine. Do you remember them at all? Do you remember what they were like?

Oh yeah, it sounds a lot cooler than it actually was. I grew up in L.A. so, they sometimes had these things, like “Kids Say the Darndest Things” on the Tonight Show, and they'd go around to elementary schools and ask kids questions. Actually, a lot of kids got on it, but I'm the only one that became a professional comedian.

I'm gonna put Johnny Carson as a credit, you know?

You’ve got folks like Doug Stanhope, and Marc Maron in your corner. How did you end up hooking up with those guys, and what's it like when you get to hang out with them?

When I started out I was even dirtier than I am now, so they'd always book me with people that I wouldn't bother. Which means I was working with people like Stanhope, and Dave Attell, and Maron, in a very early time in my career, just opening for them. So I've known them by now, since when I started, eight years or so. They're both very cool guys, both Stanhope and Maron. They're kind of like, you've heard them, they're actually kind of like the opposites...not opposites, but I mean, Stanhope has this very gruff stage persona. And he's actually the sweetest guy. And Maron has this very sensitive stage persona, a very empathetic stage persona, and he's also a very nice guy, but he's also more gruff off stage. They've both been real great to me, and helped me out with a lot of different work. When I first moved to New York, Maron, before he had his WTF Podcast, he had this internet show, and he hired me to write a few of the sketches for that. So that was one of my first jobs when I first moved to New York, and that definitely helped out. Stanhope had me open for him several times in New York, and really helped me establish myself here. They've both been great to me.

I'd like to ask about one or two of your jokes. You have one where you're talking about having sex with a BBW [Big, Beautiful Woman], and you reference Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. The way I see it, that's the best marriage of highbrow and lowbrow. Do you always come to it that way? Like, “This one's for me.” Or, do you have to think about, “Oh is this gonna work in Poughkeepsie” or whatever?

If I have to describe my style, that's how I describe it: highbrow, lowbrow. Smart, but also dirty. So, in some ways, that can backfire, because some people that consider themselves smart don't really like dirty jokes, and some people that really like dirty jokes aren't that smart. But at the same time, that's who I am and that's what I like to do. And actually you would be surprised. The thing about a well-constructed joke is it works everywhere, and people get it or they don't. Particularly, if you want get the reference to something you have to know what I'm talking about. So you're right, it does not work everywhere, and I don't do it everywhere. And you can hear, it doesn't work that well on the album actually. I was in Sacramento, and they didn't get it. But a lot of times you can do things, that, it's less people knowing exactly what you're talking about and more of just getting it. But it's like popular knowledge and actual statistics, specifically knowing something. For example, one of the jokes on the album that I think I talk about taking off my glasses. And because it was blurry, I felt like it was fucking an impressionist painting. And for the first four months I was doing that joke, I was saying “expressionist painting,” just because I didn't know better! The joke still worked because people knew what I was getting at. People like to feel smart a lot of the time, and then just laugh at feeling smart or kind of vaguely remembering what the reference might be.

You did this one-man show called "Kicked in the Balls of My Heart." I was just curious what the impulse was to do a one-man show versus incorporating that into your stand-up.

I had all these stories that I wanted to tell and I still want to tell, and I'm not really a storyteller with the stand-up, and I wanted to move into the storytelling with the stand-up, but I also felt like certain audiences, I wanted them to be prepared for something different than a typical stand-up show.

I put it all into the one-man show and it was the direction I was going to having more storytelling, and almost exactly when I finished that little run, I only did three nights in San Francisco last summer, and right when I finished that, everything started popping off with my regular stand-up. I went back to Montreal [Montreal “Just For Laughs” Comedy Festival], I got an album deal, I got the special, so I kind of had to go back to my older style and concentrate on that for a while.

When I worked through all that material, that means I also had to write new material for the clubs, so it's almost like that whole style that I was moving towards has been on the backburner since a year ago when I started that. The plan I'm working on actually may be in book form and then maybe write out the stories as a book and then also perform as well.

I've got a couple about some of your sketch videos. One of my favorites is Archduke, the time-travelling pimp who raps in Portuguese. Part of me wanted to think you learned Portuguese for the express reason of doing that. I was curious how that came about.

I actually lived in Brazil for a year and at the time I had a girlfriend who lived there and was going down to see her, and I always liked that kind of music. It had been around for a while but was very popular when I was there, the Baile Funk. It was blowing up when I lived there, and then it started crossing over to the United States after I left.

I invented the character in college. I was smoking a lot of weed and listening to a lot of P-Funk and I invented that character and I was going to write a pornomedy and put him in it, and that didn't work out. Then I started performing him as a stand-up character, I thought of it like Dolemite meets a 2000-year-old man. I had this character and I thought with the Baile Funk, perfect fit. I had the green screen and shot the whole thing in one day.

Some of your other videos like "Bukkake Milk," "Moving In," "Surgytech" and "Coach Mannish," they have old people and, for lack of a better term, well-meaning ESL students, I guess. What was it like working with those people, explaining what was going on there. It seemed like it would be fun explaining, "What the hell do you want me to do?"

Well, sometimes I wouldn't explain it, like I didn't feel any need to tell them what “bukkake” was, and I felt bad, because the main girl was actually a super cool girl who lives in San Francisco, but she didn't know what it was. Afterwards we explained it to her; luckily she was still cool with it, she didn't get mad afterwards. Some of the people were aware of what was going on, and to be honest some of them just weren't. I don't know if that's irresponsible, but I just wanted to get it done. The impetus is on them. They could read the script just as well as I could.

I guess that's the best way to go about that, though.

Yeah, I don't know. I think it could be really morally reprehensible. But that's what I do, so...it is what it is.

Googling your name, [there are] some other people named Louis Katz. Do [they] have a Rick Santorum problem would you imagine? Because someone searches for “Louis Katz the doctor” and they find "If These Balls Could Talk." Have they ever contacted you about that?

Oh, yeah, man. I know a couple of the other Louis Katzes. One of them is actually a leading expert in Thai pottery at the university over in Austin.

Another one is a specialist with Industrial Light and Magic. He used to work for Industrial Light and Magic, but he does visual effects and stuff like that. He's very good at what he does.

So luckily they're all like kind of artists, so none of them mind. I think what sucks was the guy who does the digital effects, he is the one who owns louiskatz.com, that's why I have louiskatzcomedy.com. And for a while he was living in the Bay Area in San Francisco, the same time as me, and he was trying to do a little bit of comedy. So that was like...that was horrible, you know what I mean?

He's in the place where I live AND doing comedy AND with a better URL. He was just doing it as a hobby so I asked him to take it down, so he did. But sometimes it will trip me up. Sometimes he'll get drunk and call me, and it's like I'll get a call from Louis Katz. You know. It's trippy; it's like a David Lynch movie or something. My name comes up on the phone. Me wanting to talk to me, it's fucking weird.