C.K. took the stage in Boston and looked out over the audience, "So you're all from Brookline and Braintree and shit?" and when some guy down in front shouted, "Quincy!" he turned on him instantly. "I don't give a shit where you're from," he said, and then proceeded to explain that he was here to do this act that people have paid money to see, and he doesn't understand why anyone would yell during it and interrupt him. "Why wouldn't you want it to go well?" he asked. "Because you're 20, that's why. You're fucking 20 and you don't know anything, you piece of shit."

···

However premeditated that moment might have been to establish a sense of control in the room and a useful, funny antipathy with the crowd, it was also a function of the real dynamics of his life. At breakfast the previous morning, I'd said something about the things that happen to you once you have kids—that not only do you lose your ability to relate to people without children, but now you walk around all the time with the disconcerting and irreconcilable feeling that your own kids have simultaneously saved and destroyed your life—and how his comedy explores that confusion in a way I found comforting and even sort of therapeutic.

"For me, it's more of an age thing than it is about having kids," he said. "I don't have a lot to say to people who are younger." He's 43 years old and got divorced a couple of years ago from the painter Alix Bailey, with whom he now shares custody of their two girls. "When I was first divorced, I started dating younger women, and it was really exciting. But after a while I was like, This is just dumb. You date someone younger and it's...limited. There's no future in it. And as far as just going out and getting laid, that kinda got tired for me very quickly. It's just—it's very intimate. You're letting her right into the middle of your life. You see someone and you're like, She's really hot, I want to be naked with her. And then you're naked with her and you're like, Jesus, she's in my fucking room and we're naked. The idea of that—of just fucking somebody—became silly to me."

He talked for a while about how diffcult the first year after his divorce was and how it affected his work. "For one, I couldn't really talk about my wife anymore. Not that I was ever really talking about her, exactly, but now I couldn't do that at all; I couldn't talk about the woman I was divorced from. She deserves her privacy. But that meant I had no idea where I was going to get material. It was like, 'Oh, shit, there goes my act.' " He didn't really go into why his marriage ended, except to say that they hadn't been making each other happy for a while and finally had to admit it was done. "I just sat in my pajamas for like two years," he said. "And I was nothing for my kids. And then eventually I climbed out of it and was just like, 'I can't do this. I can't fuck around like this.' I focused on the kids, and they saved my life. I thought, 'Everything's based on them now.' "

It's dumb to speculate on why anyone's relationship falls apart—what seem like the obvious factors aren't always the truest ones—but you wonder what it must have been like to be married to a guy who makes his living doing jokes about his wife's disdain at giving him a hand job or his daughter's vaginal rashes or, more broadly, to someone who's just so compulsively driven to talk about our darkest impulses. "It's a positive thing to talk about terrible things and make people laugh about them," he said during one of our conversations. "The problem is, the more famous you get, the more people see you who didn't choose to. And that's when you start pissing people off." This led to a discussion about the one joke that he worried was too much—a bit about how, if we were all "somehow okay with kid-fucking," pedophiles wouldn't kill kids after they raped them. "It's a hard thing to hear," he said. "But it's true. If we were less hating of kid-fucking, less kids would die. That's true. I don't know what to do with that information. But it's true."