Louis C.K.’s got a new Netflix comedy special, 2017, and his fans will be pleased to hear that it’s pretty much classic Louis C.K.—by which I mean equal parts hilarious and unnerving, a signature cocktail of deeply profane sexual revelations, grumpy parenting foibles, romantic nihilism, and existential despair. A lot of this material is very funny, but the innovations in C.K.’s shtick are mostly at the margins: chief among them, the fact that the comedian, who often performs in a T-shirt and whose name is practically synonymous with middle-aged schlub, taped the 75-minute set at Washington, D.C.’s DAR Constitution Hall dressed in a slick (if poorly tailored and oddly shiny) suit and tie.

Given the news cycle of the last several months, you might expect that 2017, so named for a bit about why the non-Christian world marks time relative to the birth of Jesus, would be overtly political. C.K., after all, has shown in the past that he’s willing to go there: notably, last spring, when he used his email newsletter to warn fans off voting for Trump and compared the then-nominee to Hitler.

But whatever partisan moxie inspired that email is in short supply here. With the exception of a brief, rather whimsical rant about ISIS, 2017 is not deeply ensconced in concerns specific to 2017. Political humor is conspicuously absent. In its place we get a series of C.K.’s signature conventional wisdom-upending truth bombs: rescue dogs are more trouble than they’re worth; public school teachers are “fucking losers” for wanting to do such a thankless job; kids are cute but ungrateful and selfish; other people’s weddings are hell; Matthew McConaughey in Magic Mike is almost hot enough to make a straight man question his straightness (and with this, the comedian delivers a spot-on impression of his own penis as an inflatable pool toy tentatively beginning to take shape).

That general lack of news engagement makes it all the more jarring to consider C.K.’s opening gambit: a meandering exploration of the abortion debate. It’s a deliberately reductive take on the issue, an illustration of why there’s basically no way for two such disparate world views to meet: per C.K., pro-lifers consider abortion to be baby murder, which accounts for why they sometimes get a bit strident on the subject; pro-choicers think abortion is categorically not a big deal, as casual, the comedian repeatedly asserts, as “taking a shit.” Those two ideas leave no room for middle ground. On which side does C.K. land? He’s intentionally shifty on the subject, as though, The New York Times’s Jason Zinoman suggests, “he is less interested in telling us what he thinks about abortion than in dramatizing confusion and anxiety about it.”