My kids don't know from Louis CK. (Though we all laughed our way through this great Lincoln-themed parody of his TV show. The kids now run around the house singing "Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln!") I generally don't share my favorite Louis clips with the children, chiefly because they just contain too much adult material. Too much cursing. Too much sex. Too much emphasis on the bleak side of human nature. Louis has a very good idea of how absurd we all are, and that's not something my elementary-school-aged kids need to know right now.

However, I take great solace from Louis' shtick. His complaints and frustrations and failures are stored up and doled out so that we can recognize laugh at every parental duty and pleasure and pain that we untelevised dads go through.

Like us, Louis—as evidenced in his standup and on his wonderfully odd FX show Louie—takes his role as father as perhaps the most serious thing in this life. Onstage and off-, he's a divorced dad with two young girls. The majority of his social life revolves around feeding the girls, taking them to school, etc. It ain't always pretty.

"When am I going to go to momma's again?" Louis' daughter asks as they do their pre-bedtime routine. "I like momma's better. I like momma's better because she makes good food. And I love her more so I like being there, too. I like being here, too. It's just not as great." Louis takes it in with great equanimity and, as she turns away to go to sleep, he gives his little daughter the finger.

Louis gets into an insanely immature fistfight with one of his friends. He ruins a school trip. He sleeps with all kinds of unsavory women (including one who is way too young for him as well as senior citizen Joan Rivers!). He gets bullied by a weird pair of creeps on Halloween and by a high school jock while on a date, only to, in his own strange way, deal with these jerks.

He messes up, continually, but he knows that being a dad is the central driving force of his life and that without it he is nothing. "What the hell is an adult without kids?" he asks in a Father's Day video essay. "What's the point?" He advises men not to be "mom's assistant," and exhorts them to "spend time with your kids and have your own ideas about what they need. Get into it. It won't take away your manhood, it'll give it to you." And then the punch line: after telling us all this he admits: "I found out that I'm a pretty bad father. I make a lot of mistakes. I don't know what I'm doing. But my kids love me. Go figure."

Of course, to earn the title of America's Dad (from someone other than me, I mean) Louis probably has to have a higher Nielsen share than what he currently pulls in. In fact, he spends several episodes preparing for the possibility of becoming David Letterman's replacement, with, of all people, comedy coach David Lynch!—a plan which, of course, fails. And fails hilariously.