His most significant departure from convention is dispensing with the audience. Mr. Michael speaks directly to the camera, sometimes pacing on a stage, at other times appearing in close-up, set against a black void, telling jokes followed by silence. It’s impossible to overstate how much we have been conditioned to find things funny because other people are laughing — comedy is deeply social — and it requires extraordinary confidence in your material to tell jokes without the safety net of a response.

Adding to the degree of difficulty, Mr. Michael’s comedy belongs to the tradition of Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K., making provocative, even reckless arguments while generally keeping you on his side. He aims to give voice to those weird, messed-up thoughts that other people have but keep to themselves.

During 49 minutes onscreen, Mr. Michael defends contracting herpes as a life choice: “A lot of my friends got married. I got herpes. At least mine is going to last forever.” He also argues in an aside that “Sept. 11 was just Occupy Wall Street done right” and, in a virtuoso bit of comic rhetoric, takes the Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex — that all men want to sleep with their mothers — and makes a very funny logical case for it. These are all jokes, it must be said, but subtract the laughs, and they seem less like only jokes. Unlike so many other comics who wallow in their wrongness, Mr. Michael isn’t looking just to create unease. He is fleshing out a character — his own — and is doing so by inviting you to look (and laugh) hard at his reasoning and the dark, even ugly side of what’s behind it.

Mr. Michael’s central subject is his own failure at romance. Early on, he says he doesn’t know how to make a relationship work, and that all of his follow the same dysfunctional pattern, detailing his phobia of commitment. This is familiar territory for single-guy stand-up, which is partly what justifies his unusual tactics. For while we have seen many comics skewer themselves in ways that slyly let themselves off the hook, Mr. Michael goes further than most to make himself unlikable and his arguments ring hollow.

Instead of describing the dynamic he has with women, he shows us, juxtaposing his monologues with phone conversations between him and a girlfriend, played by Suki Waterhouse. Framed in close-up, Ms. Waterhouse delivers a heartbreaking performance, doing a lot with a little, portraying a sensitive woman at that stage when a crush is turning into something more serious. We catch her with her guard down, facing a man whose barriers are always up.