In 1999, the artist, actor, and composer John Lurie invented a personality: Marvin Pontiac, the musically gifted son of a man from West Africa and a Jewish woman from New Rochelle, New York. Pontiac’s biography, as Lurie imagined it, was a wry and purposeful sendup of the ways in which critics canonize and worship the disenfranchised and the bedevilled. In Lurie’s mythologizing, Pontiac, who was born in Mali in 1932, was abandoned by his father. His mother was institutionalized in 1936. He eventually ended up in Chicago, where he studied blues harmonica:

At the age of seventeen, Marvin was accused by the great Little Walter of copying his harmonica style. This accusation led to a fistfight outside of a small club on Maxwell Street. Losing a fight to the much smaller Little Walter was so humiliating to the young Marvin that he left Chicago and moved to Lubbock, Texas where he became a plumber’s assistant.

Later, Pontiac went nuts; he believed that he had been abducted and probed by aliens. He was hit and killed by a bus, in Detroit, in 1977. Because Pontiac “held the tribal belief” that cameras suck the soul from the body, there are only two extant pictures of him—both candid, both impossibly blurry. His recordings were discovered and released posthumously, though it was also true that Pontiac’s music was “the only music that Jackson Pollock would ever listen to while he painted.”

In corralling all of our preposterous critical fetishes into a single, nonsensical narrative, Lurie is, of course, writing a kind of meta-commentary on the ways in which we assess and value so-called outsider art—that Pontiac’s characteristics (all of which point, in one way or another, to misshapen yet pervasive ideas of authenticity) are so precise and absurd is also what makes them funny. Working-class, mixed-race, mentally ill, dead and heretofore undiscovered: eat it up, suckers!

Lurie is preceded in this experiment by John Fahey, the finger-style guitarist and collector of 78-r.p.m. records, who, in 1959, invented a figure named Blind Joe Death. The name was a nod to the real-life bluesmen (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller) whose records Fahey hunted down and cherished. But Blind Joe Death’s backstory (he played a guitar fashioned from a baby’s coffin) was a gag at the expense of revivalists, who were so pie-eyed at the idea of discovering some gloomy and tenebrous new artist from some previously unreachable rural pocket that they bought in without asking questions.

“The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits,” which Lurie wrote and recorded with Marc Ribot, John Medeski, Billy Martin, G. Calvin Weston, and Tony Scherr, was released in 2000, by Strange and Beautiful Music. Even its cover—which features one of the two obscured photographs—feels like a lampooning of the many reissue labels dedicated to hunting down lost talent, and then repackaging and recontextualizing the work, trading on the idea that, in our era of abundance, obscurity is its own currency.

Lurie has always been a playful and adroit satirist, and a deft comic. His series “Fishing with John,” which aired on IFC in 1991, is a reimagination (and a spiritual dismantling) of shows like “Bill Dance Outdoors” or “Fishing with Roland Martin,” which featured a jocular man in a boat, trying desperately to catch fish. On “Fishing with John,” Lurie invites a famous friend—Jim Jarmusch, Matt Dillon, Tom Waits, Willem Dafoe, Dennis Hopper—to join him on a fishing excursion, though he appears to know very little about the particulars of the sport. His companion inevitably becomes agitated. (He takes Jarmusch to Montauk, where they try to shoot a shark by dangling a chunk of cheese over the surface of the water; he invites Matt Dillon to Costa Rica, where they perform a fish dance.)

Last weekend, seventeen years after Marvin Pontiac’s début, a new record, “The Asylum Tapes,” unexpectedly arrived on various streaming platforms. The conceit is that Pontiac made these songs on an anonymously donated four-track recorder, while locked up at the fictional Esmerelda State Mental Institution. (“I want to get out of here,” he repeats on “I Want to Get Out of Here.”) Lurie has been tweeting blurbs of support for the work from Albert Einstein (“Great spirits, like Marvin Pontiac, have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds”), Aristotle (“Knowing Marvin Pontiac is the beginning of all wisdom”), and Charles Dickens (“It isn’t the best of times, but this is an amazing record”).

“The Asylum Tapes” is, in its own way, an album about solitude and insanity—which form the twin pillars of a truly artistic life (or so we are taught to believe). There’s a complicated element of semi-autobiography to all this, too, insomuch as Lurie left New York City—where he was a darling of the downtown art scene in the nineteen-eighties and nineties—in 2008, after he and the artist John Perry became entangled in a vehement disagreement, and Lurie believed that Perry threatened his life. Lurie, who was also suffering from a mysterious, debilitating ailment (he has since said it was advanced Lyme disease), went into hiding. The entire debacle was chronicled for this magazine, by Tad Friend, in 2010. (Perhaps in response, Lurie recently tweeted a clip from the 1973 film “Papillon,” about a wrongly accused French convict, at The New Yorker’s account: “Hey, you bastards! I’m still here!” Papillon hollers that line from atop a bag of coconuts that he’s fashioned into a makeshift raft and used to escape from prison.)

The new batch of twenty-four songs features only Marvin Pontiac, with no backing band. There are some tracks—such as “Horse Fell Down the Well” or “Baby Pigs”—that feel plainly indebted to Tom Waits circa “Rain Dogs,” or to Bob Dylan’s talking blues, or to post-Velvet Underground Lou Reed, or to the blues singer Junior Kimbrough. Yet there are many that feel born of Lurie’s singular humor. On “My Bear to Cross” (its title may evoke Lurie’s beloved painting “Bear Surprise,” which became an Internet meme in Russia), he encounters a bear. “I went up to him, and he said, ‘What the fuck?’ / And I said, ‘Sorry,’ and he said, ‘What, no kiss?’ / And then he said, ‘Smell my sandwich! Smell my sandwich!’ ” All this while Pontiac plays a dark melody on an acoustic guitar.

So what’s Lurie up to with this project? I suppose it’s no more mischievous, really, than an actor singing in character, and many of our most prized artworks goof around with form, testing the permeable membrane between fact and fiction, between art and something else. (“The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, or fantasy,” a reviewer for the New York Globe wrote of “Moby-Dick,” in 1851.) Our hunger for the authentic or the unmediated has mostly begotten us a cavalcade of deeply unreliable things, such as Donald Trump, laminate flooring, fake-fake news, artisanal moonshine, and reality television. And so, somehow, it is Marvin Pontiac who ends up delivering, on the album’s fifty-six-second opening track, what feels like the most reasonable and perceptive coda to 2017: “It’s really unbelievable, the beauty and the horror of this life,” he repeats. “It’s really unbelievable.”