Yeah, he leads with it. Important to note that in the canon of blockbuster standup comedians accused of sexual impropriety, Aziz Ansari (Aziz Ansari: Right Now on Netflix, right … right now) does better than Louis CK – whose comeback shows were, as best I can tell, just half an hour of going: “What’s the deal with chicks who don’t like being masturbated at down the telephone?” There is a sombre, show-opening statement about the accusations made against him on babe.net last year, how they affected him and the conversations they started. It’s not perfect – and it’s not a whole apology – but it does at least acknowledge the elephant in the room, without shooting it to death with a high-calibre rifle. The conversation around Ansari is complex, but a public statement of remorse is a pretty good start on rehabilitating his image and career.

Right, now that’s out of the way: I simply hate every production decision made around this standup special. Spike Jonze directs, for some reason, which means the camera lurches and half-zooms around like a 90s skate vid (you keep expecting someone to grind along a pavement before a supercut of a lad with a leather thong necklace exploding his testicles on a concrete staircase railing). The whole thing is faux-graded like an old VHS (Annoying. Annoying!) and the majority of the show is tight on Ansari, Jonze often standing next to him, visible in frame, before shots of one of the most “Brooklyn” crowds ever committed to tape smiling along in the background.

We’re here to have a laugh, though, aren’t we? And, after a juddering start, a glimmer of the old Ansari swings back into view: he is, after all, an agile, wide-eyed comedian, adept at noticing the worst facets of the human condition and pulling them into the light without resorting to meanness. He plays with pace, shying back into a low, whispering, apologetic tone (too quiet, often: keep the remote near you while you’re watching this because the sound levels are all over the place. Annoying!) before booming back with a punchline. Ansari takes on woke culture without resorting to a tedious old-man-yells-at-cloud shtick; he muses on race, modern love, the death of everyone’s parents; he takes on R Kelly and Michael Jackson in a your-scandal-was-bigger-than-mine sort of way; there’s a pleasingly spicy joke about Osama bin Laden recording a feted jazz album.

The whole aesthetic is lo-fi – Ansari has lost the sculpted stubble and slick dressing of Master of None, instead opting for a T-shirt and clean-shaven-with-long-sideburns look last seen in the wild on me, first day of university, circa 2005 – and it all feels deliberate: a humbled aesthetic for a humbled man. “I saw the world where I don’t ever get to do this again,” he tells the audience at the end, thanking them for coming out and giving him a second chance. “And it almost felt like I died. And in a way, I did. That old Aziz who said – ‘Oh, treat yo’self, whatever!’ – he’s dead.”

It’s not the Aziz of old – I mean how much mileage was really left in renaming foodstuffs and publicly bullying his cousin? – but the quieter, more contrite Ansari 2.0 still has plenty left to say.