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Jonathan Storm: Real life saps laughs

"Louie" is weakened by its 2 parts and a plethora of Louis.

Louie,

latest in a string of TV comedies featuring disaffected losers, is more intimate and realistic than

Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm

, and

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,

but it's also less funny.

That's a rigged comparison because almost nothing has been as funny as those three classics of anomie.

Louis C.K. is the one-man band - executive producer, writer, director, editor, and star - behind the show, which premieres Tuesday at 11 p.m. on FX.

That seems appropriate to the big ego of the successful comedian who performs stand-up at New York's Comedy Cellar between little scripted films depicting him in the supposedly real and decidedly less effective rest of his life.

Both the silly little films and the stand-up are amusing, but their combination is jarring. Here, we see Louie so hoplessly unsuccessful as a Casanova that his date makes an escape worthy of Jack Bauer. There, we see him cracking up the paying audience with genuinely original takes on dead dogs and starvation.

Yes, the stand-up topics are in low taste, and so are the films, and isn't that the point with this kind of comedy, where Curb's Larry David hires a prostitute to ride with him so he can drive in the carpool lane, and some of the Sunny crew pretend to be crippled so they can land compassionate dates?

It's easy to laugh at these idiots because they never pass within hailing distance of success. It's harder to laugh at loser Louie in the films because he's clearly doing very well in his professional life.

Seinfeld started as a sitcom bracketed by cabaret performances by its successful namesake, but quickly dropped the format. Real life, in the form of the stand-up performances, had no place in the theater of the absurd that was the rest of the show. It still doesn't.

There's another problem with Louie. Too much Louis, and not just in the making of the show. Those other successful comedies spread the cluelessness among entire teams of characters.

C.K. - it's the phonetic pronunciation of his actual name, Szekely - foundered in 2006 in an HBO show, Lucky Louie, about a guy who worked in a muffler shop and had a wife and a little kid. It was edgy and unvarnished and all that good stuff, but it was really too crude and mean-spirited for what was essentially a family show.

This series, perhaps because there are some standards, even though it's on late and on FX, is gentler and has potential. But somebody needs to step in and tell Louis to round up a few friends and save his stand-up for the comedy specials.

Jonathan Storm:

Television

Louie

11 p.m. Tuesdays on FX