Live at Madison Square Garden

Arguing that hard drugs should be legal for ninety-year-old women is familiar territory for him, but what holds the set together is watching arena scale meet club-level rhythm. Instead of dialing up broad theatrics for twenty thousand people, he relies on unhurried riffs about childhood pets, American Girl dolls, and the regional stupidity behind the Boston accent.

Recorded in January 2015 during the final show of a three-night stand in New York City, the set arrived on his website that August as an audio download. Because it shared substantial material with his televised Comedy Store special from earlier that year, he released it under a pay-what-you-want model ranging between one and eighty-five dollars.

At eighty-six minutes, the recording is looser and noticeably longer than the filmed special. He wanders through routines on fatherhood, commercial flights, and the bleak logistics of aging while on an announced hiatus from his FX show Louie. The release won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album in 2016.