“I grew up in a time where the definition of manhood was so narrow,” he says. “You were either Clint Eastwood or you were Richard Simmons . There was nothing in between. There were no Paul Rudd s. No kind-eyed Mark Ruffalo s.”

Gulman has been a meticulous joke writer for years, a reliable killer on late-night shows, if not a star in the larger culture. In part, that’s because his finest jokes don’t hit you in the gut so much as tickle your brain. They have a literary quality, a rhythm and an ear for language that leads him to favor unexpected words (“cretin”) and phrases (“limit your quench”). As David Letterman used to do in his late-night monologues, Gulman savors a colloquial term, repeating it until the mundane starts to sound odd. “Millennials take so much flak, so much guff,” he says, enjoying articulation, spitting out sounds with gusto. “Flak as well as guff. I don’t know what irritates me more, the flak or the guff.”

He doesn’t overexplain punch lines, which can sometimes put him ahead of the audience. In “Depresh,” one joke about how drinking Sprite in the 1970s could raise questions about your masculinity assumes a bit of knowledge of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

In his last special, “It’s About Time” in 2016, Gulman expanded his ambition, earning a big comic payoff by fitting jokes into longer set pieces including the digression-rich epic on state abbreviations that is probably his most famous joke and one of the finest bits of the decade. Patton Oswalt has said he would steal it if he could get away with it. As respected as it was among comedy fans — and Gulman has enough stature among comedians to give out daily advice on Twitter, which has become a window into the craft of jokes — this joke did not make him famous, or happy.