Louis CK Has An Inspiring Story For You About His Holiday In Post-Soviet Russia

It’s Thursday afternoon, the weather is terrible, and we now live in a country that threatens to murder people’s small dogs. If you’re feeling a little glum about all this, it’s just a great time to kick back, make a cup of tea, and let one your favourite comedians soothe you with a surreal story about a pack of homeless children in Soviet Russia.

I promise it will actually make you feel better.

Here are those last few lines again because, let’s be honest, they’re pretty damn great:

“I couldn’t believe what I just saw. That the misery in this country at that time was so calculable and so predictable, this guy thought, ‘My shoe’s broken. Oh, there’s a child. He’s sure to have some glue in his hand, because the state of our nation is so wretched’. And he looked at me, and I was startled — he laughed, and I laughed. And he was the only person I had any contact with in the whole Soviet Union. And I realised, this is why I came here: to find out how bad life gets, and that when it’s this bad, it’s still fucking funny.”

Louis CK told this strangely calming tale as an acceptance speech when receiving an award as the guest of honour at last night’s Moth Ball. In case you haven’t heard of them before, The Moth are a not-for-profit storytelling organisation based out of New York that are all about “true stories told live”, and — as Louis suggested — making you cry.

If you’d like to see more stories told from some of your favourite people, here’s Neil Gaiman and Dan Savage‘s contributions; if you’d like to have a good ol’ cry instead, here’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and oncologist talking about the nature of death and a young man from Uganda who “dreams of an iron roof for his family”.