"Disgraced comedian", Louis CK in Bratislava, 2019
2019-12-03 Comments
After my husband received an email at the end of October, about the upcoming shows that Louis CK was performing in Europe, I was quite looking foward to seeing him live. The last time we had watched him (in London) was August 2016 - before his scandal. We looked on his website to look for tickets and venues. Unfortunately, he was not playing in the UK and we looked at other European cities with only the intention of a look-see where he was touring.
From having a sneeky peek to seeing what dates and venues Louis was playing we suddenly ended up booking seats to watch him in Bratislava. Out of curiosity we selected a couple of tickets to see how much they were. Whilst we had the tickets in the basket, my husband called his mother to check if she was free that weekend, for babysitting. It just so happened she was and he turned to me, "Im up for it if you are" was my response. Neither of us knew anything about Slovakia and when we looked at pictures of the Old Town in Bratislava, we were sold.
With that in mind, we thought we would make the most of a long weekend and had a very pleasant few days in Bratislava. We visited many of the tourist attractions (Michael's Gate, The Old Market Hall, The Blue Church, Presidential Garden, Bratislava Castle and the Main Square). And the nicest thing we hadn't taken into account was the Christmas market which was set up in the Main Square. There were some delicious stalls with mouthwatering cooking smells wafting about.
The show
At the venue, it was very busy. We got there early and put our coats in the cloakroom, then we were stopped and our phones were sealed up in a case, so that no one could film the show. We found our seats easily, they were dead centre to the stage. As we waited and the place was filling up, there were several instances where people were sat in the wrong seats. They thought there was a double booking, but after looking more closely, they had the wrong section. This "double booking" happened again in the row behind us and then in front in the first row. The guy next to me got worried and showed me his ticket, it had the same section C, seat and row number as my seat. I checked it was for the right date and time, which were also correct. But when I checked it against our ticket I noticed in small print, ours said "vpravo" and his said "vlevo" which was "right" and "left" in Slovak. It so happened the stairs coming down, divided section C in half and the seat numbers were the same on either side of the section. What made it worse was people who had their ticket details on their phone couldn't look them up. Confused? Many were.
As for the show, initially there was an announcement from a guy with a terrible Soviet accent having a dig at Louis's disgrace, but he was unable to sustain it for long and Louis told us from behind the curtains that he would be out after his support acts. He and his support acts were very good. It's comforting to know that there's still nothing sacred for the man. He poked fun at legless people, dead babies, the Holoucaust and every religion known to man. Halfway through the set, he was humble enough to bring up the subject of his scandal and came clean that masturbating in front of an audience was his "thing" and he felt at this point, he would give a bit of advice that only HE could give: Even if you have gotten their permission and checked again, just don't do it.
Once that was out of the way, he went on with his remaining new material. I'm not going to give too much away - spoilers! Anyway, once he finished his show, there was a standing ovation and a quick Q&A. The highlight of the evening for me was straight after the admission about his "thing", one member of the audience promptly told him to "whip IT out, we're all watching" and he quipped back "no, you haven't paid nearly enough for me to do that". A good come back!