Another one of Louie’s classic politician moves: Referencing his humble roots, which he did when he noted how he makes “a whole lot more than my grandfather who taught math and raised chickens in Michigan.”

Plus, he began a mass email in May with “Hello friend,” which is how just about any political message begins when it's coming from a campaign that has your email address but not your first name. (Though an earlier email of Louie's began, “Dear haver of the eyes that are reading this.”)

I used a document analysis tool from the Overview Project to analyze 16 Louis C.K. emails dating back to 2011. Overview was designed to help people comb through massive sets of data—thousands of pages of government documents obtained in open-records requests, for instance. So, while it was perhaps unusual software to apply to Louie’s email corpus, it found the common thread in an instant: According to Overview, his messages are overwhelmingly characterized by promotional language. Key words that come up again and again are: special, tonight, tomorrow, tickets, ticket, buy, price, sorry, and oops.

All of these terms perfectly encapsulate Louie's simultaneously apologetic and persuasive tone, the same tone he adopts onstage, and in his self-titled FX show and, yes, in his mass emails. All this is revealing not because he's using email to promote himself—of course he emails his fans because he wants them to buy stuff—but because Louie is so much better at this approach than the average politician. He uses the same communications vehicle as a person mass-emailing for donations and for votes, but Louie makes the genre work.

How? Because he acknowledges plainly what he's doing. In other words, he's in on the joke.

When public officials try to sound personal, they often come off as creepy or just fake. I don't actually believe Michelle Obama emailed me to ask, “Do you want to meet Barack, Adrienne?” or that Congressman Paul Ryan wants to know if I'm “Ready for lunch?”—both recent subject lines from messages in my inbox.

But Louie makes it clear that he knows you know what he's doing—like when he signs off “your annoying person,” or writes something like “For any of you that didn't go to buy it and this is just a tedious, worthless email for you, I am truly, honestly, kind of, not really sorry at all.” He tells you he hopes you're having a great day, then immediately reminds you he's writing to a sprawling and anonymous audience of people, as he did in January 2013:

Seeing as this email goes out to about a quarter of a million people, the odds that all of them are having a terrific day are very low. I would say at least thirty two thousand four hundred and sixty two of you are just having the worst day ever. The kind of day where, when someone smiles at you, you really want to punch them right in their stupid mouth. And here now youre getting an annoying email from that comedian you used to like, but enough already with that guy anyway. Well, in any case.... Hello. To all of you.

So his emails feel honest in a way that political emails don't. Even when he gets sappy—or maybe especially then—Louie is able to strike a balance that most politicians aren't: He's wealthy and successful, but he's that guy who wears T-shirts, and maybe didn't comb his hair, and spells parentheses as “parentesies.”