As a genre, the stand-up special has never been treated with much respect. The 1979 classic “Richard Pryor: Live in Concert,” which introduced many fans to the genius of this influential artist, is one of the most important movies ever made, but can you even name the director? (It’s Jeff Margolis.) So it’s no surprise that stand-up filmmaking has a pretty dreadful history. George Carlin and Sam Kinison performances have been filmed as if they were high school musicals. Behind these blandly shot movies is, I suspect, a perfectly rational insecurity about the ability to recreate the peculiar feel of live performance. People who see a lot of live comedy know how different the experience is from seeing it on a screen. As a result, perhaps, some directors lower their ambitions.

Mr. Lee exposed the timidity of that strategy in “The Original Kings of Comedy“ (2000), a virtuosic concert movie capturing the riotous, arena-rock energy of a bill featuring Steve Harvey, D. L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer and Bernie Mac. What made the movie so compelling was that Mr. Lee filmed these comics the way Brian De Palma shoots a suspense scene, with swirling, dreamy camerawork that aggressively tells us where to look.

When Mr. Harvey pantomimes a kid playing hide and seek, the camera freezes and moves behind him so we can see the look on his face when he turns. Mr. Lee adds slowed-down blurry effects to Cedric the Entertainer’s arms during a physical comedy bit involving “The Matrix.” Mr. Lee’s technical tricks can be indulgent. His “Kobe Bryant: Doin’ Work” (2009), which trained 30 cameras on this Laker star, was almost a parody of the sports world’s camera-angle fetish. But Mr. Lee takes a more stripped-down, restrained tack in his new specials.

Mr. Williams, who arrives onstage following a cloud of smoke and a caged tiger, does not need any help creating excitement. Dashing around the stage in a tuxedo, he’s a whirligig of a performer, and Mr. Lee gives us as many close-ups as possible. And when Mr. Williams runs toward one side of the stage, Mr. Lee swings the camera from the opposite direction, matching his momentum. When the comic slows down, the director joins him, as Mr. Williams mixes jokes about race and sex with knowing ones about his history with the law. “I can’t be mad at everybody,” he says, explaining why he won’t skewer Paula Deen. “I’m on my fifth second chance right now.”

Mr. Carmichael is a more static, soft-spoken presence. His joke writing is more skilled than his performance, which adopts a pointedly endearing pose. Like Mr. Williams, he jokes about how our culture doesn’t really care about tragedy, saying we fake outrage so we don’t look like monsters. “Am I going to forget where I came from?” he asks. “Of course I am. Like almost immediately.”