Kathy Griffin On What Louis C.K.'s Attempted Comeback Means for Comedy

The Internet had a collective meltdown this week when the news broke that Louis C.K. had performed a surprise set at the Comedy Cellar in New York less than a year after admitting he'd sexually harassed numerous women by trapping them in his office and masturbating in front of them. The sheer amount of thinkpieces the news spawned is overwhelming -- everyone has a take on what C.K.'s reemergence means for the #MeToo movement.

Comedian Kathy Griffin has a more informed opinion on the issue than most as a woman in comedy, and took to Twitter to share her thoughts in a 26-point thread. She started by saying that an unnamed "famous woman comedian" had told Griffin she's sick of the "boys club" of comedy and wanted to leave the industry.

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"[M]ale comics don't ever have these thoughts. They don't feel beaten down by the business. You'll never hear a successful male comic say that dealing with women in the business is just exhausting and that they have reached their limit. Or that they're tired of years of having to beg to be treated the same as women or that they've had enough of the emotional abuse," said Griffin. "[W]hat I'm discussing in this thread can be applied to any industry."

Griffin continued: "You know how many women I know who have had their careers effectively ended because they asked for the same amount of money as a man or who dared to make script suggestions on a show they were working on? How quickly they were labeled as 'difficult' and thus un-hirable? Louis [C.K.] can go jerk off in front of women [without] their permission [and] then his management destroys their careers and he just gets to waltz back in without any accounting for his behavior and what he's done to fix it?"

"[T]he boys club closes ranks and protects its own. And many men in the business [w]ant to see Louis come back because deep down inside they know they've also done fucked up shit to women," she said. "[T]hey want to know that it's not going to hurt them on a permanent basis. Louis is their test case.

Read Griffin's entire thread here.