He was the wisecracking know-it-all, asking a voter originally from Wyoming if his old neighbors “have running water and indoor plumbing there yet.”

He was the hyperkinetic policy proposer, telling a middle-aged man that the solution to affordable housing was to “have a tax for the very, very superwealthy apartments — $10 million ones.”

And he was the civic superman, swooping up a nanny’s stroller in his arms and carrying it down a flight of subway stairs. “Have a great day,” he told her, as cameras captured every second.

Anthony D. Weiner, the exiled, ostracized and written-off former congressman, re-emerged on New York City’s political stage on Thursday as his essential, unvarnished self, at once gratingly self-mythologizing and charmingly self-effacing.