When exactly did Louis C.K. become the most awesome stand-up comic on the planet?

We've always been big C.K. fans. We loved his short-lived HBO series, Lucky Louie—because what's not to love about parents who curse in front of their kids and masturbate in kitchen closets?—and his 2008 Showtime special, Chewed Up, was filthy good fun. But if you've caught any of his recent talk-show appearances, you might have noticed the same thing we did. Louis C.K. has slowly been evolving from a dependably funny stand-up to the comedy lovechild of Bill Hicks and George Carlin.

Need proof? Check out C.K.'s spot on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, which first aired in early October and has been making the rounds on YouTube and other viral video Web sites ever since. If you don't find yourself nodding along with C.K. in fierce agreement, and even occasionally pumping the air with a raised fist salute, you're either dead inside or a member of that “crappiest generation” C.K. was talking about.

Somehow, Louis managed to do something even Obama has had a difficult time pulling off lately: Finding the silver lining of our nation's ongoing economic collapse. In less than five minutes, C.K. made a convincing case that capitalism's death knell might not be such a bad thing after all. Sure, it could mean donkeys will become our primary source of transportation, but it could also lead to the triumphant return of rotary phones and manual credit card machines. Suck on that, kids who have no idea what the hell any of that is!

Ricky Gervais, who cast C.K. in his upcoming film This Side of the Truth, called him “The funniest stand-up working in America”—and if the guy who created The Office says that, you know it's probably true. It’s only a matter of time before C.K. is drafted into Comedy’s All-Star Team, and he ends up cavorting in his tightie-whities with Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd at Vanity Fair photo shoots.

I spoke with C.K. by phone while he was in Des Moines, Iowa, on a stop in his latest national tour, Louis C.K.: Hilarious. During our interview, he nibbled on a club sandwich and spoke in a rumbling baritone that sounded like Darth Vader with a better sense of humor.

VF Daily: As somebody who has watched your rant on Conan no less than 23 times in the past week alone, I am now convinced that you're both a prophet and a slightly cooler version of my grandpa when he gets on one of his nostalgia kicks.

Louis C.K.: Thanks, man. I definitely don't think of myself as a prophet, though. I guess I just hit a chord with people. It's funny, I started doing that bit on stage, and then the Conan spot was coming up and I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it. I've been trying to get enough material for another special, and I knew this would be a great bit for the hour. So my instinct was not to do it on Conan so I wouldn't overexpose it. But, well, a lot of shit was happening in October and there was this bad feeling in the air; people thought they were losing everything. It just seemed like the right time to talk about it. I was genuinely confused by the doom and gloom. Was anybody really pleased with the way things had been before it all bottomed out? From what I saw, the more possessions we had, the more miserable we were.

You seem genuinely delighted that the foundations of capitalism are crumbling. Are you just naturally a glass-half-full kinda guy, or do you think consumerism has corrupted us?

I just don't trust any of it. Every time I read something about how there's been another ridiculous climb of the Dow Jones, there's a part of me that goes, “This can't be good.” None of this is real money. You know what I mean? It's not like there's actually more of anything. It's just ideas. When people are getting richer and richer but they're not actually producing anything, it can't end well.

Another Great Depression might do us some good. It'd be like economic rehab.

That's exactly what it is. It's forcing us back to reality. “Wait, I only have the money I make from work? How am I supposed to live on that?” Figure it out. We've spent so many years being spoiled that we don't know how to live anymore.

Has technology spoiled us?

It's definitely spoiled us. When you have a slightly slow signal on your PDA, or it takes more than 30 seconds to download a picture of Axl Rose on your iPhone, and that irritates you, something is very, very wrong. “This is too slow!” Well, why wouldn't it be a little slow? Why do people think that they're owed a perfect day as a consumer? The phones are as good as they are. But Americans feel like it's in the Constitution that our phones should work perfectly all the fucking time and that we get the most bang for our buck. We think it's literally a human right, like it was mentioned in Thomas Paine's “Rights of Man” or something. An American is somebody who could be anywhere — at the ends of the earth, in the middle of nowhere — and if they hit that one pocket where their cell service isn't great, they'll look up at the sky and scream, “What the fuck!!” Jesus, man, calm down.