Barely four minutes into Jerrod Carmichael’s 2014 debut comedy special, ‘‘Love at the Store,’’ he makes a joke about the death of Trayvon Martin. ‘‘Money changes you,’’ Carmichael tells the audience, recounting how he recently entered his upscale apartment building wearing a hooded sweatshirt and made it through the lobby unquestioned by his doorman. ‘‘I was concerned,’’ he says. ‘‘I pay a lot of money — like, a lot of money — so that niggas in hoodies like me can’t waltz by you.’’ Addressing the doorman, he adds, ‘‘Next time, stand your ground.’’ The laughter that greets this phrase is scattered and uneasy, but Carmichael only digs in. ‘‘Really?’’ he says. ‘‘ ’Cause, like, that Trayvon [expletive] is really affecting your day to day … you wake up, have your cup of coffee, and you do this’’ — he blows a kiss — ‘‘to a picture of Trayvon. And then you start your day. Is that what you do?’’ Carmichael grins genially. ‘‘ ’Cause you don’t.’’

Carmichael has one of stand-up’s most unorthodox approaches to exploring race and class, and in building to his Martin joke, he assumes an unexpected voice: that of the race traitor. While working on ‘‘Love at the Store,’’ Carmichael argued about this bit with Spike Lee, who signed on to direct the special at his request. ‘‘I just didn’t think it was funny,’’ Lee wrote in an email, ‘‘and it was too soon to be making a joke about’’ Martin’s ‘‘coldblooded murder.’’ Carmichael — insisting that his aim was not to mock a dead teenager but to explore what it means to truly care about his death — kept it in. ‘‘I want to be a voice that challenges,’’ Carmichael told me recently.

He takes this mandate to extremes that can verge on perverse. Consider the bit, soon after the Martin joke, about how Carmichael can’t wait to grow rich enough to say ‘‘Republican things’’ out loud such as: ‘‘I don’t think people on welfare should be allowed to eat breakfast . . . which is kind of true when you think about it. Like, you’re building up your strength for what?’’ The satire and ironic distance here is sliced razor-thin; it gets thinner still when Carmichael, declaring that some people are ‘‘more important’’ than others, describes ‘‘looking at my little cousin, and you can just tell he’s gonna work at Wendy’s. Like, you could see it in his eyes: He has Wendy eyes.’’ By the time Carmichael arrives at his own account of police brutality — he was once slammed to the ground by L.A.P.D. officers, their guns drawn, because ‘‘I fit a description’’ — he is on the way to a point about how America’s racist legacy is worth accepting because, were it not for slavery, ‘‘I would be in Africa right now. Africa. Are you hearing what I’m saying to you? Like, they have AIDS there.’’ Jammed end to end with such jokes, Carmichael’s special is unrelentingly bleak — even toxic in its nihilism. And yet Carmichael remains supremely affable, speaking in a slow, honeyed voice and smiling throughout. ‘‘Your groans,’’ he tells the crowd, ‘‘will only make me go deeper.’’

At 28, Carmichael is one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising young comics, and his preoccupation in ‘‘Love at the Store’’ is black-American success: systematically thwarted, highly politicized and something he enjoys all the same. In 2011, impressed by his stand-up, the makers of ‘‘New Girl’’ asked Carmichael to test for Winston, a main character, but he turned them down, uninterested in tying himself to someone else’s sitcom. That self-assurance paid off. NBC eventually picked up his own sitcom, ‘‘The Carmichael Show,’’ and the same week that he shot ‘‘Love at the Store,’’ the hit feature comedy ‘‘Neighbors’’ — which starred Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne — arrived in multiplexes, with Carmichael in a scene-stealing role. (Initially envisioned as a white Jewish kid, the part was rewritten for him.) This month, ‘‘The Carmichael Show’’ returns for its second season; a ‘‘Neighbors’’ sequel, again featuring Carmichael, arrives in May.