Louis C.K.

Some comedians build their careers on their successes, others their failures. Louis C.K. belongs to the later camp, having piloted two notorious flops that only furthered endeared him to a growing cult audience: He wrote and directed 2001’s Pootie Tang, which Roger Ebert in half-star review likened to “one of those lab experiments where the room smells like swamp gas and all the mice are dead,” and he conceived HBO’s “Lucky Louie,” an homage to working-class sitcoms so critically reviled that, despite passable ratings, the network canceled it to save its image. Instead of halting his career, however, these projects have only furthered C.K.’s reputation as one of today’s most uncompromising even visionarystand-ups. Tonight the stand-up, who peppers his low-key observational humor and ruminations of middle age with bawdy tangents, will be filmed for an upcoming special, “Louis CK: Hilarious.”