TV

Louis C.K. back with hilariously grim fourth season

There are lots of reasons Louis C.K. has earned the moniker “king of comedy,” as GQ’s May cover puts it, but one of them is knowing when to make himself scarce. Instead of force-writing his sitcom into increasingly withered comic territory (I’m looking at you, “Flight of the Conchords”), he took a hiatus from FX’s “Louie,” which last aired in 2012, if you can believe it.

Hence, the fourth season’s new episodes feel as fresh — and misanthropic — as ever.

“Ever wonder what happens after you die?” he says in one comedy club bit. “Actually, lots of things happen. Just none of them include you.”

Welcome back, old friend!

The first two episodes will be structurally familiar for fans of the show; the first, a pastiche of Louie’s daily life, takes on gleefully noisy early-morning garbage removal; revisits his comedians’ poker group, in which Jim Norton confesses to some unorthodox self-pleasuring methods; and advises his daughter, whose assignment from school is to “write a letter to AIDS.” (Given the comic’s recent critique of Common Core, it’s perhaps a pointed send-up of the public school curriculum.)

He also manages to throw his back out while gesturing to a vibrator in a sex shop, leading to a conversation with an apathetic doctor (Charles Grodin) that seems adapted from his older bit about how, when you’re over 40 and injured, physicians will basically tell you to “just be happy it doesn’t hurt all the time.”

The second episode is a single-focus plot that seems like a stand-alone short film, a format C.K. was increasingly favoring toward the end of last season. Guest star Jerry Seinfeld gamely takes on the role of a really snotty Jerry Seinfeld, who invites Louie to open for him at a Hamptons charity event and promptly throws him under the bus.

It’s a fish-in-a-barrel set-up, showing the perennially black-T-shirted comedian bombing in front of a crowd of sequined caviar-eaters, but it may be the first time he’s portrayed himself as less than successful onstage; this is usually the one venue in which his character can count on making it work, despite the rest of his life’s shortcomings.

The rest of the episode veers wildly into a comic’s sadistic fantasy, in which one stunning blond model gets all of his jokes, tells him the rest of the billionaire crowd are a-holes and seduces him at her beachside mansion. Inevitably, this will not go smoothly. But we close — and I don’t think this is a major spoiler — on our man with both a banged-up face and a smile, which feels about right.