Louis C.K. is winding down his current standup tour, which has run for more than six months in over thirty cities across the U.S. and Europe. In April, HBO will air a one-hour special and you’ll have a chance to watch what C.K. likes to call “the new shit.” Don’t pay attention to that slightly off-key performance in his “Saturday Night Live” monologue last fall: from Boston to San Francisco he’s been killing with that very same bit. I’m sure he’ll kill with it in Oslo when he gets there in a few weeks.

It’s been almost seventeen years since C.K. retired his impression of John F. Kennedy (if John F. Kennedy were a hooker in Saigon), or his joke about negotiating with a woman about what he’d let her shove up his ass during sex. That was back in the Clinton years, back when he had hair. Since then, he’s evolved from bedroom comic to examination-room comic. His tours have become a kind of yearly medical checkup—which is to say, animated by the spirit of candid probing and propelled forward by the slow, inevitable drumroll of decay.

Every year, he fills in the latest details in the downward trajectory of his mortal existence. At age forty, he described the tangle of emotions he felt upon realizing that he had tits. At forty-one, he told us that his crotch and lower belly constituted an undifferentiated mess, pink and swollen “like a pig’s ass.” A few updates later, at age forty-four, he explained to an audience at Carnegie Hall that his penis resembled an “old man’s nose” and that it was like “that horse that nobody even brushes any more, in the back of the stable.” Even at this late stage, he’s still learning how to live. He just recently learned that “food is not supposed to be a disgusting, debilitating vice. You’re not supposed to have to cancel shit because of what you ate.”

As I write this, C.K., now forty-five, is making his way to Boise, Idaho, where he’ll inform his fellow citizens about a truly unfortunate bodily function, between the numbers one and two, that he classifies as a “1.5.” For those who are verbal learners, he’ll recite a short cycle of autumnal, haiku-like similes for the slack state of his sphincter. He’ll describe, in precise detail, encounters with a variety of older, even more broken down people. But he won’t burden his audience with complaints. On the contrary, it is with evident pride that he now sets himself up as a model for fat guys with “no faces.” Everyone in the theatre will go home mortified and full of good cheer.

With each annual installment, his audience has grown—and grown more loyal. His career has followed the opposite path of an athlete’s: as his body declines, his star rises. If C.K. is a feminist, or has a contribution to make to gender theory, it may be in his studies of the body. More likely, this relentless exploration of physicality is his rendition of Gogol. In a recent “questionnaire” for Vanity Fair, he named Gogol as a favorite author. This choice is particularly suggestive when you consider that, of the literary moralists he tends to favor, Gogol is the only one who’s also a comedian (his other favorites: Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Richard Wright). It isn’t hard to imagine Louis C.K. reading “Dead Souls” and underlining Gogol’s summary of miserable Plyushkin, a stingy, spitting, munching, wealthy, toothless hoarder who does nothing to conceal the snuff poking out of his nostrils.

To such worthlessness, pettiness, vileness a man can descend! So changed he can become! Does this resemble the truth? Everything resembles the truth, everything can happen to a man. The now ardent youth would jump back in horror if he were shown his own portrait in old age.

Louis C.K.’s comic universe is populated by many such warped loners: characters who cling to their positions in the world by the flimsiest of threads and whose morality tales seem designed specially to horrify the ardent youth in all of us. The material in the new show is no exception. Just wait until you meet his aged neighbor and her wretched dog with its cloudy eye.

Still, there is something slightly inconclusive about his standup these days. The material is sharp, the jokes are as tight as ever. But that’s the thing: they feel like jokes. If there’s something missing here it’s due entirely to the strength of “Louie,” the TV series. It’s spoiled us. The show has elaborated on and refined C.K.’s standup—and not just the material but the form itself.

His TV sojourn started with “Lucky Louie,” an ill-fated 2006 HBO series. That show, which lasted only a season, was a literal translation of the standup material; in some cases, standup bits were transposed verbatim into dialogue, which came off as awkward and stale. In a promo for “Lucky Louie”—a show that was filmed in front of a live studio audience—C.K. tellingly confessed that “as long as there’s an audience, I’m comfortable.” But with “Louie”, on FX, he moved out of this comfort zone. He stopped feeding the joke meter every few seconds, and instead dug into drama, scene setting, and editing. The pace slowed, the tone darkened, and the laughs were placed in their natural environment: the comedy club.

By positioning the laugh-out-loud material down in the Comedy Cellar, he gave himself a much wider space to explore the quieter, melancholic comedy of life: His reaction to his six year old daughter giggling as she tells him “I like momma’s more and I love her more”; being moved almost to tears by a violin soloist performing on a subway platform, as a rotund homeless man strips off his rags and bathes himself only a few feet away. “Louie” has ventured deeper into the dimly lit comic territory of Gogol, a world of forlorn people and their grim transactions.

The willingness to imagine exaggerated scenes and characters—the show’s gestures of “surrealism,” as they have often been called—aren’t mere flights of fancy but rather an ambitious effort to look harder at the world, to access a more alert and probing realism. A younger woman squirms away from Louie’s advances on a park bench and immediately hops on a waiting helicopter; Louie desperately runs away from his father, even though he is not being chased; Louis’s agent, the person who manages his future, is a gawky fourteen-year-old boy in a suit. The weirdness of the scenarios is intended to be an accurate representation of the very real weirdness of daily life, the kind that is usually ignored or immediately blocked from memory. Does this resemble the truth? Everything resembles the truth, says Gogol. Everything can happen to a man. That is exactly the experience of our hero in “Louie.” And, in that world, the standup show may be critical but it’s only one element of the larger picture.