About a decade ago, backstage at Zanies comedy club in Nashville, Tenn., Bobcat Goldthwait felt so sick of doing the whinnying shriek and guttural grunt of the character that made him famous that he decided to kill him off. Then he walked onstage and shocked everyone by acting like himself. “It was shaky,” he said of the response to his composed manner. One frustrated fan yelled: “Do the voice!”

He had heard it before, and knew a quick howl would appease the crowd. Instead, he dug in and has remained there since, with a few fleeting exceptions. But his tortured relationship with his own persona remains a preoccupation, including in the first episode of his darkly satirical “Bobcat Goldthwait’s Misfits & Monsters,” a “Twilight Zone”-like anthology series that has its premiere Wednesday on TruTV. It tells the macabre story of a beloved cartoon character named Bubba the Bear who enters the real world to terrorize the actor who gave him his dopey voice (Seth Green).

Mr. Goldthwait, who wrote and directed the series, imagined the episode as “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” meets “Cape Fear,” but once it was finished, his daughter, Tasha Goldthwait, the show’s costume designer, helped him understand its real subtext when she pointed out that he has a Bubba haunting him.

“I’ve always been battling this perception people have of me, this character,” he said over coffee in downtown New York during a recent trip from Southern California to finish editing. “It follows me around. Bubba the Bear shows up when I’m checking into a hotel, when I’m on a plane. I can’t get upset with people if they’re only aware of a small part of my body of work. But inside I do.”