Louis C.K. performs at Madison Square Garden. Photograph: The New York Times/Redux

If you want to figure out why standup comedy has become the most romanticized American art form of the past decade—and there are numerous factors, I’m sure, from podcasts to YouTube to … well, basically, it’s the Internet—you could start by reading the long e-mail that Louis C.K. blasted to his fans on Tuesday, moments after sending word that his new special was available on his Web site. (Subject line: “Very long email from Louis CK.”) Unlike his past few specials, C.K. filmed this one in a comedy club. Why? Because, C.K. wrote, clubs are “where comedy, standup comedy, truly lives.” These are the places where comedians “say wicked, crazy, silly, wrongful, delightful, upside-down, careless, offensive, disgusting, whimsical things.” When a comic performs at a club, it’s late and everyone’s drinking, he noted. “These are the things we do when we are DONE working and being citizens.”

But this paean to the after-hours freedom of the night club doesn’t entirely get at why a great comic like C.K. is hailed as a “genius” in glossy magazines and is asked about being a “philosopher-king” by Charlie Rose. To understand that, consider the joke-writing process that C.K. describes later in the e-mail. In Los Angeles, where the New York-based C.K. filmed the special, he would do “twenty minutes of new material” at alternative venues and get “cheered on by the young, open and adaptive crowds” there. Then he would take those jokes to the Improv, “where the more basic and average character of the audience would cut the new material down to about three jokes.” And then he’d take those three to the famous Comedy Store, where, he writes, “maybe ONE of those jokes would get a chuckle.” That’s the keeper.

Fiction writers and poets workshop their material, but they do so, typically, in small rooms full of other writers, often led by luminaries in the field. When, after test screenings, filmmakers recut their movies for the “more basic and average,” the practice is generally bemoaned. But comedians are seen as honest populists: laughter, we think, not only feels good but teases out universal truths. It doesn’t, necessarily: we laugh at all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. (Among the things we laugh at in comedy clubs, according to C.K.: “Intentionally false and misleading argument.… Half truths. Non-truths. Broad and hilariously wrongful generalizations.”) But there’s a notion that comics, by honing their material so that it can work almost anywhere with almost anyone, discover something essential and true in the process. We may be suspicious of lyricism and dubious of a gripping plot, but jokes—jokes are for real.

The jokes in the new special, called “Louis C.K. Live at the Comedy Store,” are, by and large, not as good as the jokes C.K. told in his five previous one-hours. Those shows set a high bar, one that it’s not surprising C.K. failed to clear, given the furious pace he’s kept since the first of these specials came out, in 2006. (He’s lately added serious movie acting to his duties as a standup and those he bears as the writer, director, and star of one of TV’s best shows.) Early in “Live at the Comedy Store,” he does some material about the Boston accent—not really an accent, he says, just a “whole city of people saying most words wrong”—which is funny and, as always, well said, but it feels like material someone else maybe could have done. When he drops “Jews” into a list of scary characters (child molesters, et al.), it’s definitely a Louis C.K. joke, but one he’s more or less told before. A late riff about the difference between sexism and racism has the scope of C.K.’s most ambitious jokes, but seems underdeveloped and unsophisticated by his standards. The set has a merely amusing closer, about Ray Bolger’s hammy acting as the Scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz.”

The special is still littered with funny things only C.K. could have said—or done, as when he pantomimes strangling his own baby to satisfy a businessman on a plane who is annoyed by her crying. (This bit worked even better when I saw C.K. do it live at Madison Square Garden a few weeks ago; the physicality of C.K.’s standup, expert and economical, is perhaps the only aspect of his work that one can still call underappreciated.) He tells some good stories about death—a favorite subject—describing the passing of a family dog as “a dry run for Grandma,” so that when she goes, he can simply remind his kids about what happened with the dog and say, “Yeah, so, Grandma now.” But the special lacks the kind of standout moment that you share with your friends the next day and that changes how you think about something.

What it does have, at least early on, is a visual style that evokes David Lynch. After brief exterior shots of the Comedy Store, the camera cuts to a ragged-looking man onstage, his hair clumped from an apparent lack of washing, his hirsute arms bare. This is Jay London, a comic whose best-known joke is, “You might recognize me, I’m the fourth guy from the left on the evolutionary chart.” We don’t get his name, just pieces of his act, heavy on one-liners. (“This is my stepladder.… I never knew my real ladder.”) Sweating, in close-up, he looks for a moment like he might have emerged from the dumpster behind Winkie’s Restaurant. Los Angeles is David Lynch’s town, after all, and the Comedy Store has a reputation as a fairly haunted place, well chronicled in William Knoedelseder’s book “I’m Dying Up Here.” It also has a dark-red curtain behind the stage that Lynch can probably appreciate.

These Lynchian overtones don’t seem entirely coincidental. C.K. is a serious Lynch fan—he even cast the director in a key part on his TV show—and, in the long e-mail to his fans, C.K. says that the Store represents the “dark side of comedy.” Though the jarring, surreal opening minutes give way to a straightforwardly directed standup special, they also hint at what C.K. could do to keep this format fresh. “Louie,” his television show, frequently exhibits a kind of cinematic strangeness that C.K. has thus far not brought into his specials, save for this brief taste. I hope it’s not the last time that he does so.

The note of cinematic surrealism works particularly well because it sets off C.K.’s stage persona, which is very regular guy. He is a highly intellectual writer and performer—he has cited Milan Kundera’s “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”* as an inspiration for his TV show, he names Gogol as one of his favorite authors, etc.—but when he stands in front of a microphone, in jeans and a T-shirt or maybe a sweater, he becomes something like an avatar for ordinary experiences and frustrations. In addition to his undeniable talent and incredible work ethic, C.K.’s persona has likely helped him to become the comedian of this decade. If we look to standup as an honestly populist art form, who better to practice it than a man who embodies the “basic and average”? But C.K. is often at his best when he’s finding the weird and the unexpected in the ordinary, as in his latest special’s extended riff on rat intercourse witnessed at a subway station. “Live at the Comedy Store” doesn’t reach that bewildering, sidesplitting place as memorably as C.K.’s previous specials, but it does show, once again, that he knows the way there.

*Correction: A previous version of this post misstated the title of Kundera’s book.