When Dan Harmon took the stage at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles on June 16, several weeks after he’d been fired as showrunner of NBC’s “Community,” the mood in the room was tense. Harmon had been performing his live show, “Harmontown”—part stand-up, part confessional, part drunken pop-cultural exegesis—for about a year. But that night in June was his first performance post-“Community,” and from the moment he began talking, it was clear that the purpose of “Harmontown” was new. “Tonight is about weightlessness,” he said to the quiet crowd. “I woke up this morning and I realized I have nothing to do.” The laughs came gradually as the audience relaxed. “There is nothing left for me to say,” he said. “I am third-act—what’s his name? What’s the guy who died of heroin? I am third-act Lenny Bruce.”

With Harmon at the helm, “Community” was one of the best comedies on network television: a relentlessly strange and touching riff on the joys of communal loserdom that could not have emerged from any other brain. And in the wake of Harmon’s tenure, there is no better portal into his loopy, hyperactive, razor-sharp mind than “Harmontown.” It is a catalog of his obsessions, a safari through the innermost channels of his noisy head. He sits onstage and chats up audience members, impersonates celebrities, and occasionally spars with his girlfriend, Erin McGathy. He professes his love for video games (“where my efforts are rewarded in a linear fashion”) and his disgust with the blandness of the network TV landscape. “Harmontown” was initially framed as a town hall meeting in which Harmon and the audience jointly planned a new, utopian society, and in the beginning it was intended as a kind of private experiment: Harmon asked his fans not to publish clips of his shows on YouTube. But shortly after he was dismissed from NBC, he announced that he would take “Harmtontown” on the road for a 20-city tour and began posting podcasts of his performances online.

Harmon is not the first figure in exile from a TV network to nurse his wounded ego by setting out on a national comedy tour. In 2010, Conan O’Brien responded to losing “The Tonight Show” by embarking on what he dubbed the “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour,” which hit 30 cities and sold out repeatedly. In Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, a documentary made about the tour, O’Brien—despite his $30 million-plus payout from NBC—appeared sullen and unshaven. “Sometimes I’m so mad I can’t even breathe,” he said. His act outlined the “seven stages of grief” for deposed late-night hosts. The tour was clearly an attempt to burrow among his supporters, to seal himself off from the noise of unsympathetic voices. “The last year has taught me that at this point in my career it’s not about trying to get more people into the tent,” he told The New York Times in 2011. “It’s about trying to deepen the connection I have with my fans.”

These comedy tours are about as far from the world of network TV as possible.

A year later, Charlie Sheen went on his own post-professional-implosion tour after being forced off “Two and a Half Men.” Of course, Sheen is not a comedian, and his tour was a different animal: crassly and stupidly commercial, more about milking his brief notoriety for money than communing with fans. His mental instability was on pyrotechnic display. He rambled and ranted, inviting the crowd to witness “a night of absolute redemption.” “I want my job back,” he said at one performance. But even here there was an underlying anxiety to have his worldview validated. He wanted to be appreciated; he fancied himself a folk hero for the misunderstood.

“Harmontown” is not nearly as unpleasant as either of those shows. But at times it feels similarly like a campaign for ratification of his own resentments. Alex Pappedemas’s recent profile of Harmon for Grantland—for which Pappedemas spent 36 hours on the road with the former showrunner—described the tour as an extension of Harmon’s deep-seated desire to “be out there in direct communication with the small but passionate group of people who liked his TV show because he wanted to connect.” And to listen to podcasts of “Harmontown” from the weeks after Harmon’s firing is to hear a man emphatically in his element, fueled by reflected indignation, cordoned off inside a critical world of his own creation. “I probably did some stuff to get fired,” he says in one performance. “I’m sure I did. Like, I never ever did anything they wanted me to do.” The audience, of course, ate it up.