‘How was your last couple of years? Anybody else get in global amounts of trouble?” It was only a matter of time before Louis CK, disgraced in 2017 when he admitted to masturbating in front of several female comedians, confirmed his comeback with a special. Sure enough last weekend, mid-lockdown and out of the blue, Sincerely Louis CK – recorded in Washington DC last year – was made available on his website.

Like Aziz Ansari’s corresponding show a year ago, this set is hard to watch through any lens other than that of CK’s behaviour. And, of course, he addresses them, in a manner you may find less pious than Ansari’s, or less penitent, depending on how reprehensible you considered CK (or how much you loved his work) in the first place. Judging by this set, CK doesn’t think he did anything uniquely bad. Everyone has their sexual quirks, he argues, and now, he reports shamefaced, “everyone knows mine” – from Barack Obama to the Italian kid pointing at him recently in an airport.

Towards the end, he fronts up to the issue of consent, reminding his audience that he sought consent from the women involved, but acknowledging (indirectly, via jokes about a similarity between the sounds of female sexual pleasure and slaves singing “Negro spirituals” in the fields) that that may not have been enough. This not-quite apology – heavier on self-pity than concern for the women involved – won’t be enough for those outraged by CK’s behaviour. But it’s all we’re getting, and at least it’s consistent with CK’s unsentimental worldview, which sees us all as amoral screw-ups struggling to get from cradle to grave with some shreds of dignity intact.

That is the keynote in a show with a handful of jokes to recall CK’s once permanent residency on all those “world’s best” lists, and more that recall his too cynical 2016 Edinburgh festival show. You can’t say he’s not hunting big game, comedically speaking. He opens with a section on God that includes an unsparing riff on his mother’s recent death and cremation. God is summoned to Earth to clear things up with a five-minute press conference – which, coincidentally, gives sexual deviants a free pass but comes down hard on carnivores. (“How could you eat a perfectly fuckable pig?”)

That’s far from the only routine in whose margins CK’s harassment scandal lurks, just out of vision. Elsewhere, there’s some straightforward baiting of liberal pieties, as with a routine about “retarded people” that feigns to strike a blow for social justice while savouring the phrase “retarded people” a little too much; a riff on whether CK wants to “fuck kids” or not; and another about a Japanese waitress with a funny accent. Sometimes, it’s all a bit of a strain: “I used to date a woman who was vegan. So I had to fuck her with my dick substitute.” Oh dear.

Perhaps, now the veil has slipped, CK can no longer be bothered pretending to the loftier ideals that used to offset his more cynical material. But then some of his cynical gags here (the one about visiting boutique gift shops, say) are wickedly good, and there’s higher-minded material, too – on his grandfather’s flight from Hungary to Mexico, or on his relief, aged 52, that he now has only a manageable length of time left to live.

On this evidence, it looks as if that time will be spent performing standup, even if – because the context’s changed and because that doesn’t seem to be bringing out CK’s best instincts – he may be doing so to smaller and less joyful audiences.

• Available at louisck.com.