But this churning over the meaning of existence has always defined Bob-Waksberg’s comedy. In Olde English, an absurdist comedy troupe he and Conover joined at Bard, Bob-Waksberg often played the role of a clueless yet self-righteous millennial. The group was successful and cutthroat; it would meet often to jettison members who weren’t carrying their weight, with one member ordered to deliver the blow. “The ultimate pejorative was if you came up with something and someone else described it as corny,” Bob-Waksberg says.

After graduating, the Olde English crew migrated to New York and tried to develop ideas. Before calling it quits, they produced some co­medic gems, including a film called “The Exquisite Corpse Project,” a twist on the Surrealists’ parlor game. Each member wrote 15 pages of the script, but the next member saw only the last five. The result is a glorious mess of tone changes and character U-turns interspersed with snippets of commentary. Bob-Waksberg’s section features a speech delivered from a Santa Monica beach days after he moved to Los Angeles. Wearing a tie, he wonders about the project before going global:

“Here’s the problem with everything. As soon as you get something you want — it’s no longer a thing you want, it’s just a thing you have, and then you want the next thing. So I’m starting to realize maybe I’ll never be satisfied. ... I’ll find the girl of my dreams, I’ll get married and I’ll have kids. Then, like a week later, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, this is [expletive].’ ”

Then a heckler with a football jumps in the frame and ruins the take.

For most of the winter, Bob-Waksberg, Hanawalt and the rest of the “BoJack” staff finessed the details of the show’s third season in preparation for sending storyboards to Korea for animation. In one episode, BoJack wanders an underwater city in silence because he can’t figure out how to talk through his sea suit. He misses the premiere of “Secretariat” but assists in the birth of a family of seahorses. As the staff worked, there was much debate over the size of the pregnant male seahorse’s belly, the length of the episode — Bob-Waksberg likes to bring in every show at 25 minutes 30 seconds — and the color of the ink on an apology note BoJack writes to a director he betrayed. As a break, I suggested we watch an episode from the second season, “Escape From L.A.,” which had moved me but which, until then, I found too harrowing to watch again. In it, BoJack escapes the pressures of shooting “Secretariat” and visits Charlotte, a deer he knew 30 years ago who now lives in New Mexico. He’s convinced that if they had gotten together, his life would be better. He arrives to find Charlotte happily married with two kids, including a beguiling teenager named Penny.

The episode opens with scenes of Charlotte’s domestic bliss. When BoJack arrives, he says he’s in town for the Santa Fe boat show and — to make the lie believable — buys a yacht that he parks in the driveway. Bob-Waksberg asked an assistant to freeze the screen.

“We knew things were going to break bad here, but the idea was he was going to sleep with Charlotte,” he recalled. Then someone in the writers’ room suggested that BoJack try to bed Penny instead. “Once that was said out loud, sleeping with Charlotte just felt so boring and expected,” he said, laughing. “You can’t get that genie back in the bottle.” I asked him if he polled any outsiders about whether a middle-aged depressive trying to sleep with a high-school senior was over the line. He thought for a second. “A friend left her sweater here, and her assistant came to pick it up, and we asked if it was too much, and she said, ‘No, I’d go with it,’ and that was it.”

As the episode unfolds, BoJack takes Penny for driving lessons. He contemplates staying and teaching theater at a local college, but this idea is never mentioned again. (The subplot that goes nowhere is something of a Bob-Waksberg trademark.) BoJack magnanimously offers to drive Penny and some friends to the prom. He teaches them that they don’t have to fit in, but then he gets one of them drunk and dumps her at the E.R. with alcohol poisoning. Still, Penny is having a magical evening and is the one to make the first move.

“If you want to do it,” she says, “I’m ready, I have condoms in my room, and I know how to put one on with my mouth.”