Less than a month after Louis C.K. once again kicked up controversy for, among other things, roping school-shooting survivors into his stand-up set—and less than a week after his longtime friend Janeane Garofalo stuck her neck out in order to defend him—the disgraced comedian has come out with the brashest challenge to his critics yet. In a new stand-up performance at San Jose Improv Wednesday night, C.K. directly addressed his history of sexual misconduct—which was widely reported and confirmed by C.K. himself in 2017—by opening his set with a joke that does not sound, entirely, like a joke: “I like to jerk off, and I don’t like being alone.”

According to the Daily Beast, the line was delivered without a trace of apology and “got a good laugh.”

This show of defiance is a far cry from the contrite-seeming C.K. who, over a year ago, responded to allegations that he had forced several women to watch him masturbate by releasing an apologetic statement that read, in part: “There is nothing about this that I forgive myself for. And I have to reconcile it with who I am. Which is nothing compared to the task I left them with.” His admission was met with swift and decisive action, as his longtime TV home, FX, decided to sever all ties with C.K. His latest movie, I Love You, Daddy, was also pulled, and C.K. was dropped by both his management company and his publicist.

Over a year later, it looks like C.K. has found a way to forgive himself after all. “My life is over,” he told audiences during another stand-up show back in December. “I don’t give a shit. You can, you can be offended, it’s O.K.”

The comedian also addressed his most recent controversy on Wednesday night, saying: “If you ever need people to forget that you jerked off, what you do is you make a joke about kids that got shot.” Despite C.K.’s new controversy-courting attitude, the joke he was alluding to—presumably one he told in December, about the survivors of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida—was dropped from his latest set. But jokes seemingly designed to offend, about “retarded kids,” 9/11, and the anatomy of certain racial groups, remained.

C.K.’s latest parade of alienating humor came after a packed crowd at the San Jose Improv greeted him with a standing ovation. Earlier that night, as fans waited in a bucketing Bay Area downpour to see the comedian, Daily Beast reporter Stacey Solie interviewed a handful of them to take the general temperature of the crowd. The first person in line, Tiff Ting, told Solie: “I don’t spend a lot of time trying to follow public figures’ private lives.” Just behind her, Juan Duran said of C.K.’s history with sexual misconduct: “I don’t know him. . . . It’s he said, she said.” When Solie pointed out that, in this case, the “he said” corroborated the “she said,” Duran pivoted: “Everyone deserves a road to redemption.”

Duran’s thoughts mimic Garofalo’s. The comedian appeared on a podcast last week to push back on those who have responded negatively to C.K.’s foray back into the world of stand-up: “When he performs at the Comedy Cellar and people get all irate, if nothing else, care about his daughters. If nothing else—if you can find no compassion for him, which I think you should—think about how his daughters, who hear all of this stuff, feel. Why don’t you leave him alone for them if you’re so women-empowering?” she said.

The mood in San Jose on Wednesday wasn’t entirely supportive of C.K.’s rocky road to supposed redemption. A crowd of “about 30 [or] more” protestors showed up, according to the Daily Beast, attempting to shame both C.K.’s crowd and the venue itself for booking the comedian in the first place. Whether or not C.K. saw the protest, he was evidently bolstered by the damp crowd that made it inside for his set. “You’ve read the worst possible things you could read about a person, about me, and you’re here,” he told them, before going on to say that the point of stand-up was “to say things that you shouldn’t say.” If that’s the case, then this new version of Louis C.K. has crowned himself the king of comedy.