Subject: From a longtime fan who wants to come back
Dear Louis,
I want to start by telling you that I was, for a long time, a devoted fan. I saw almost everything you made until 2017– the specials, Louie, Horace and Pete (which I bought), the radio and podcast appearances, the early stuff people forget about – and I saw you live more than once. You were one of the artists I trusted most to say the true thing that everyone else was too polite or too scared to say. As a writer myself, I recognize that as the gold standard of what we do. Your comedy mattered to me.
Which is why the last several years have been so hard.
I’m still on your email list. Whenever I get a note from you, I have the same thought: Why do I still get these? I really need to unsubscribe! But then: just one more. I’ll read this, and that’ll be it. And yet somehow my mouse pointer never reaches the bottom of the page to hit that button. Because I realize now I am still waiting. Still hoping.
So this is how I got to read your deliciously sprawling June 30, 2026 tour letter – the one about Ridiculous – start to finish. And by god, Louis, it moved me. The generosity is amazing. You went out of your way to name the club owners hanging on by a thread, the bookers who kept you working when you had nothing, the bus driver, the young comics you’d just met, the old Italian guy in Cleveland you tell you love because he’s old and who knows. That’s not a man performing humility. That’s a man who pays attention to other people and wants them to feel seen. It’s one of the most attractive qualities a person can have, and it’s all over that letter.
I loved reading it, as I love reading most of your letters. But that pleasure is tainted by the “yeah, but” that echoes in my head when I’m exposed to your work. What sucks for me is that the candidness and honesty and self-reflection that makes your work stand out is missing where it matters most.
I don’t want to mince words. What you did was serious. You masturbated in front of women and over the phone – women who were in your industry, who admired you, who could not freely say no because of the power you held over their careers. One of them later said the exciting part for you seemed to be the fear on their faces. Some of their careers suffered for coming forward, while yours (eventually) did not. I know this isn’t the same as violent assault, and I’m not pretending it is. But “not the worst thing” is not the same as “not a real thing.” It sits on a spectrum – it’s coercion, it’s an abuse of power, and, let’s be clear: it’s a real form of sexual violence. It represents real harm done to real people – and the distance between it and something worse does not reduce it to zero. It was wrong, and it was yours to own.
Your 2017 statement admitted the facts. It did not do the rest. You said you’d “wielded that power irresponsibly,” and then, over nearly a decade of touring, Grammys, podcasts, and now a Netflix special, you have never actually reckoned with it – not in a statement, and not, tellingly, in the work, where I most hoped it would be. You built an entire hour by grinding it out night after night in shitty rooms in Poughkeepsie and Key West, and in all that honing, this was the thing you left on the floor.
I am not asking you to grovel. I’m asking you to do the thing you are singularly good at: tell the truth about yourself, out loud, in a way that helps other people understand it. You have done this brilliantly before. Your bit about how, as a white man, you could get in a time machine and go to any past era and be fine, while a Black person obviously could not – that’s not just funny, it’s a genuinely progressive idea delivered so cleanly that it lands in people who’d never sit through a lecture on privilege, who would never read Isabel Wilkerson’s earth-shattering book Caste. You have a gift for making a hard truth feel obvious – even generous. Nobody is better positioned than you to make your own fans understand why what you did was serious, including the ones who dismiss it as no big deal – who are, frankly, the ones I most want you to reach.
You could do it in the act. You could do it in a well-worded letter on your website, or in the messages that arrive in our inboxes. I don’t need it staged or sentimental. I need it to be honest, and to include the words that have been missing: that it was wrong, that it hurt people, that you understand it as more than an embarrassing personal failing. That you did damage – damage that you regret.
I am not part of a mob, and I’m not looking for a reason to stay angry. I’m looking for a reason to come back. There are a lot of us in that position – people who loved your work, who miss it, who are standing at the door waiting for you to say the one honest thing that would let us walk back through it without betraying our own values. You wouldn’t be humiliating yourself by doing this. You’d be doing the bravest and most useful bit of your career.
The man who wrote that tour letter is capable of it. I just need to see him turn that attention, for once, to the people he hurt.
With a certain kind of hope,
~Brian Panhuyzen