His primary technique for communicating this idea is crowd work, which he has long done, but to less aggressive effect. His interactions with the audience here are pointed, strategic, a conversation that is really setting a series of traps. It is crowd work that mocks the wisdom of the crowd. He makes people cringe without teetering over into cruelty.

In a bit about the ridiculousness of being criticized for using the word “niggardly,” he singles out a white man in the audience and asks him to say it into the microphone. The man’s anguish gets a big laugh. In another even more dramatic moment, Ansari delves into online scandals by pranking the audience (saying more would be a spoiler) to expose how badly people who know nothing about a subject want to weigh in.

“You think your opinion’s so valuable you need to chime in” on stuff that doesn’t even exist? he demands, pivoting to a more general point about many people debating online: “They don’t really care about learning and exploring and discussing. They just want to chime in with their little programmed reactions.”

This is the bitterest line of the show, and it’s impossible not to think he’s speaking about the viral reaction to his scandal. It’s ungenerous, which is not to say it doesn’t contain some truth, but some of Ansari’s analysis, like some of the worst internet discussion, cuts corners in service of a point. When he talks about why R. Kelly is being canceled, he says the reason is the music star’s crimes were put in a “bingeable documentary.” What’s missing here is any mention of #MeToo, the real revolutionary shift that led to not just more scrutiny of Kelly but of Ansari as well. There’s also a thin section on gender disparities in birth control that feels tacked on.

Still, Ansari’s comic mockery has gotten more precise since his tour last year, which broke down the world into woke people, Trump people and everyone else. Now he narrows his frame to the warfare between performative progressives and their antagonists bellowing about the PC police.

Ansari delicately weaves his critique of this tedious combat into his own personal story, reminding us that he’s not that good of a person. Toward the end of his show, he does some material about his grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s that seems intended to soften us up.