Dispensing with his usual jeans and a T-shirt, he wore a skinny tie and a black suit, a costume that made him look less like a slovenly everyman than the showbiz star that he is. But don’t let the new image fool you. He’s returning to his trustiest subject matter: grousing dad humor, bleak jokes about romance and loneliness, gay fantasy (his bit about lusting after Ewan McGregor has a superior sequel with the stars of “Magic Mike”), vignettes empathetically imagining the perspectives of the least likely people, and racial humor dancing up to the line of bad taste before a confident pirouette.

No one finds comedy in the perverse with more ingenuity. In one inspired take on the members of ISIS who behead their captives, he suggests that they don’t like bald victims as much because it’s more difficult to hold their severed heads aloft. That’s positively cheerful compared with his dominant theme of the night: Suicide, which he normalizes, recounting the many times we think of it. In the middle of a paean to naps, Louis C.K. tosses out this strange description: “It’s like you get to kill yourself and take it back.” Only Louis C.K. could make you wonder: Did he just deliver a mundane ode to the nap as an excuse to bring up a defense of suicide?

In his personal stories, Louis C.K. rarely plays the loser anymore and is more likely to present himself as a smug or entitled bore. But he has not abandoned his aggressively dour worldview and resolute pessimism, particularly when it comes to romance, which he portrays as ephemeral and doomed to curdle into tension and ire.

He approaches this theme from myriad directions, sketching the subtext-rich relationship of an older couple, complete with characterizations and details of clothes and personality that reveal his gifts as a dramatist. The way he portrays their relationship, both in old age and the afterlife, begins modestly and evolves into a lovely and melancholy playlet. He also tries a personal story, mulling the absurdity that the reason he had kids, the source of his greatest happiness, was to avoid a fight with his wife. And he even makes his point through math: “Love plus time minus distance equals hate.”

This may sound like a downbeat show, but isn’t. There are hopeful notes, strategically placed, and frequent shifts into crowd-pleasing bits. As in his last special, which was recorded at Madison Square Garden, he incorporates a multitude of goofy voices, this time including a hammy Bela Lugosi-style vampire, an Elizabethan Lothario and a slew of stereotypical characters that he says stuck in his head since he was a kid watching old television shows. “Stereotypes are harmful,” he says. “But the voices are funny.”