The greatest jokes, Louis C.K. tells me, never register as jokes. Not quite. The punch line of a great joke may punctuate it and make people laugh, "but it doesn’t solve the joke, doesn’t stop it, so the joke keeps going and going and going..." And the more it keeps going, he explains, the more it tends to "point."

"Toward what?" I ask.

"Well...nothing." C.K. shrugs. By which, it turns out, he actually means: nothing_ness._

"I’ll give you the perfect example," he offers, "but... Wait, is your oatmeal hot enough?" C.K. is an attentive conversationalist, lots of eye contact, asking as many questions as he answers. Oatmeal’s fine, I tell him. "I’m sorry," he says. "I gotta get my oatmeal hot first!"

Fair enough. It’s a brittle February morning, the streets around this SoHo café glazed with black ice. He arrived on foot—his walk pegged him a block away, that crouched, duck-foot shuffle, a man wary of his own senses—and needs his porridge just right. Once it is, he continues. "There was this comedian named Fred Greenlee, who got hot in the ’80s. He had a couple of jokes about suicide that all comedians love. One was ’You know that thing when you put the gun in your mouth and the barrel touches a filling and you get that [whole-body shiver] _uuughhhhh _feeling? Don’t you hate that?’ "

After I finish laughing, C.K. continues. "I’ve been trapped in that joke for thirty years. Happily so. First, there’s the hilarious notion of having an annoying little twinge at that terrible moment. But then there’s a—what is it, an epistemological problem?—that keeps me in that joke forever. ’Cause he’s taking you down a road. You have a gun in your mouth. Okay...what’s happened? You’re sharing this peeve about the dental filling—does that mean you didn’t do it? Did this irritation cause you to remove the gun from your mouth? Did it jar you out of your despair?" He’s getting a little excited. "Or are you a dead person commiserating with everybody who’s ever shot themselves in the mouth? I love jokes that don’t answer themselves completely, because you think about them forever."

When it comes to his own jokes, C.K. is proudest of those for which he must commit with Method-actor rigor to some rhetorical or moral absurdity—and then take his argument several parsecs beyond its "logical" conclusion. He’s always striking through the mask, Louis C.K. It’s not just a matter of braying aloud what the rest of us only dare to think; he says things we aren’t even aware we’re thinking until we hear them from C.K. That’s his genius.

Yeah, that word. I hesitate to use it. First because overuse has cheapened it into a kind of aerosolized cheese, and second because C.K. himself is ruthlessly precise in the way he uses and talks about language. (From his 2010 special, _Hilarious: _"We don’t think about how we talk.... ’Dude, it was amazing.’ Really? You were amazed by a basket of chicken wings? What if Jesus comes down from the sky and makes love to you all night long and leaves the new Living Lord in your belly? What are you going to call that? You used ’amazing’ on a basket of chicken wings! You’ve limited yourself verbally to a shit life!") If Louis C.K., né Szekely, were "merely" the greatest comic talent of his generation, which he is, he’d merit...well, "the most electrifying comedian since Richard Pryor." But not "genius."

The G-word applies because Louis C.K. is, like Pryor, so much more than, and more _vital _than, a comedian. I’m not referring here to the quantitative "more than" of C.K.’s extra-stand-up professional life, mind-boggling as that is (writing/producing/directing/starring in his semi-auto-biographical FX series, _Louie, _starting its fourth season this month, large roles in David O. Russell’s American Hustle and Woody Allen’s _Blue Jasmine, _et cetera). I’m pretty sure I’m not even referring to content—that is, to the endless shocks of self-recognition C.K. delivers, about how we Americans are and aren’t thinking, feeling, fucking, connecting in the second decade of the twenty-first century. No, C.K.’s genius is all about how he forcefully accesses that psychic marrow of ours, "going there" in an era in which it’s gotten all but impossible to shock. There is nothing he can’t and won’t demystify or de-sentimentalize. "[My 4-year-old daughter] is a fuckin’ asshole," he rails in 2007’s _Shameless, _thereby pimp-slapping everything decent everyone in his audience hopes they stand for. "’You think I actually give a shit about the dog you saw?... I’ve got better stories than you. I have an interesting life. I’m on TV. I won an _Emmy. _You don’t ask what happened to me today in my life, you little bitch!’"