Late Night: Louis C.K. isn’t afraid to make Jerry Sandusky jokes

When it comes to making light of terrible situations, the question is always the same: How soon is too soon? While the Internet is already teeming with jokes about Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football assistant coach convicted last week on 45 counts of sexual abuse, the reliably hilarious and frequently provocative Louis C.K. tested the waters with some edgy Sandusky-related material on “The Tonight Show” on Monday night.

Ostensibly, the comedian was there to promote the new season of his critically beloved FX series, “Louie,” which premieres this Thursday, but as is his wont, he used the appearance to deliver a more casual and seemingly off-the-cuff version of his stand-up routine.

“I don’t think women are better than men; men are a lot worse than women. There’s not even a comparison,” he claimed. The worst thing women can do is be “annoying to a guy,” unlike men, who are capable of extreme levels of “nonsense and violence,” according to the comedian.

“A woman, you could say, ‘My mom makes me feel stupid. ‘Oh, really? My husband murdered me,” C.K. joked. “Kim Kardashian’s annoying. Really? Hitler killed everybody.”

The audience seemed to enjoy the Hitler-Kardashian comparison, and C.K. went for it. “Even when you hear of a guy who’s a great guy, he’s an amazing guy, he’s a community activist,” he began, seemingly speaking in the hypothetical. “Then it just turns out he’s been molesting kids for years.”

Of course, C.K. was referring to Sandusky, who ran a charity for disadvantaged children, many of whom became his victims. Rather than expressing outrage over Sandusky’s behavior, C.K. took a more irreverent approach.

Noting the sheer quantity of the charges against Sandusky, C.K. wondered, “When did he have time to coach? When did he have time to do his job? The most impressive thing is how good that offense was considering how much time that dude spent. How good would Penn State be if that guy wasn’t wasting his time?”

The abuse went on for so long, C.K. claimed, that “by the time they caught him he was done. He was like, ‘I’m sick of it anyway.’ ”

The “Tonight Show” audience responded to the material with a mixture of laughter and disapproving groans. For a guy like Louis C.K., that’s the perfect place to be.

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