Howard Stern, now 65 and in the legacy part of his career, has a message.

“I’ve evolved,” he says.

To that, I ask: Has anyone listened to his show lately?

Much of Stern’s fan base, and I count myself among them, have a complicated relationship with him and his show. When he’s at his best, Stern can be blisteringly funny while riffing on a range of issues, from politics to celebrity to “Game of Thrones.” He is a fantastic interviewer. Before satellite and streaming and podcasts, Stern made hours of otherwise-painful commuting enjoyable.

Yet this personal growth he crows of — in service of hawking his new book, by the way — is hard to believe.

Sure, he’s gotten rid of strippers and porn stars and Butt Bongo Fiesta. But nearly 40 years on, Stern relies, possibly more than ever, on problematic comedic crutches, most notably a group of physically challenged and/or mentally impaired adults he calls The Wack Pack. Its most prominent member and oft-recurring guest is a woman Stern used to call Wendy the Retard.

Today, she is known as Wendy the Slow Adult.

Progress!

It seems an obvious observation, but somehow, Stern hasn’t realized that it’s not funny for anyone — let alone someone pulling down a reported $90 million a year, who socializes with Jerry Seinfeld and Paul McCartney and is on a first-name basis with the president of the United States — to be routinely making fun of society’s most vulnerable. These are sad people.

Why does Stern still do it? Is it laziness? Habit? Outright contempt?

And Stern, so sensitive about his own physical shortcomings, has never stopped subjecting his staff to on-air shaming over everything from the size of their teeth to their weight to their diets or their finances or the states of their marriages — while his own second marriage, to a model 20 years his junior, is always off-limits for Stern. His longtime producer, Gary Dell’Abate, is known to most fans as “Horse Tooth Jackass.”

Ritual humiliation is part of the job description on “The Howard Stern Show.”

Most troubling is Stern’s decades-long treatment of Robin Quivers. As his so-called sidekick, Quivers has been the show’s ostensible voice of reason and its lone female voice. Stern calls her his rock. Her daily news segment is a fan favorite.

Yet Stern, who has vilified such #MeToo monsters as Harvey Weinstein and Les Moonves, almost always introduces Quivers’ segment with crude songs, sung by fans, about her breast size or their masturbatory fantasies about her or the graphic ways they’d like to sexually degrade her.

This is a woman who survived childhood molestation by her father. It began when she was 11 years old. She has written about it and spoken of it on the show. Quivers has called it a “nuclear explosion in my life,” yet Stern still uses her childhood trauma as a punchline, often.

Maybe he should stop doing that?

To those who’d like to believe this self-proclaimed redemption arc, take note: Last week, his show mocked Simon Cowell’s “man tits,” speculated on the size of Michelle Obama’s genitalia, and compared Nancy Pelosi’s appearance to a porta potty with a yeast infection.

But there’s one thing you can’t take away from Howard: He’s always known how to tell a good story.