The sentimental take on having a child is that it pushes you to look beyond yourself and place the needs of others over narrow self-interest. But in his latest special, “Oh, Come On,” David Cross, a new parent, describes it as pure narcissism: “It’s this subconscious thing in the back of everyone’s head, this idea, you know, ‘I like me. I think there should be more of me in the world.’”

In his long, pioneering stand-up career, Cross, who helped build the alt-comedy scene in the 1990s and made some of the most significant Bush-era polemics of the following decade, has always exuded a certain self-regard, if not smugness. His salvos against political opponents or people of faith (he’s an atheist) can operate like an articulate sneer, and a hallmark of his acidic comedy is the muffled anger of someone exhausted by the stupidity surrounding him.

This kind of comedy can be pulled off, but it’s tricky, and can easily fall victim to self-indulgence. With the possible exception of his jokes about fatherhood, which are sharp, unsentimental and more economical than the rest of his digressive 70 minutes, Cross’s labored new special picks easy targets: Grateful Dead cover bands, hippies, Southerners with thick accents, and Twitter memes (although he does have a good self-deprecating joke about his own failures at tweeting).

Wearing ripped jeans and a baseball cap that sometimes casts a shadow over his eyes, Cross moseys back and forth over three rugs that give the stage the feeling of a sparsely decorated room in a bed-and-breakfast. In a time when the direction of comedy specials is increasingly ambitious, Lance Bangs’s camerawork is rote, using old-fashioned cutaway shots of people laughing, but not always bothering to find different audience members.