Going through a middleman to put out a televised version of his latest stage show clearly rankled Louis C. K., who is used to getting in front of an audience and daring them not to laugh. Besides, some of the economics of dealing with cable bugged him. He was paid a fee upfront and the cable outfits shouldered the costs, but he had no participation in the backend — DVDs, on-demand and reruns.

“I’ve never seen a check from a comedy special,” he told Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air.”

Louis C. K. portrays himself as a working stiff, a 44-year-old divorced father who is capable of telling sort of mean jokes about his own children. But he’s displayed a great deal of digital savvy, carefully building a simple user-friendly site to facilitate the transaction. His default setting for whether a customer wanted additional product information from Louis C. K. was “No. Leave me alone forever, you fat idiot.”

The download of the Mp4 to my laptop took under four minutes and I still had two streams and two downloads left. (I watched one of the streams on my iPad at bedtime.) When he began the experiment, he did a Q. and A. on the Web site Reddit, a great place to address those inclined toward piracy.

“I think it is really interesting that I brought the price so close to stealing and made the movie so easy to get and made it so clear that it’s a human offering that it sparked a debate about pirating,” he wrote. “To steal from someone and not feel bad, you either have to be a sociopath or view the act differently.”

By putting a face on the content, Louis C. K. changed the subject from whether it is O.K. to game a big corporation to whether it’s morally appropriate to simply take the work of an artist that other people have paid for.

On Wednesday on his site, he declared the experiment a success.

“I’m really glad I put this out here this way and I’ll certainly do it again,” he wrote. “If the trend continues with sales on this video, my goal is that I can reach the point where when I sell anything, be it videos, CDs or tickets to my tours, I’ll do it here and I’ll continue to follow the model of keeping my price as far down as possible, not over marketing to you, keeping as few people between you and me as possible in the transaction.”

Louis C. K.’s ability to hack his own route to his public brings joy to the Web-inclined — “Louis C. K. wins everything ever,” said the wags at Vulture, New York magazine’s Web site — but will seem less charming to the cable outlets who teamed up with him and helped build him into a juggernaut. But his exalted status as someone worth paying for on the Web not only derives from his exposure on cable, but also from the fact that he is one of the funniest humans on earth.

“This is not about cable, it’s about concerts,” he told me. “I have been out on the road for a long time selling tickets, and me and the people I work with aren’t that surprised, to be honest. We knew people would buy it. People have been paying for what I do for a long time now.”