Meet Louis CK: the nicest guy in massively offensive comedy

Frankie Boyle may have set a new bar for offensive comedy with Tramadol Nights, but upsetting Jordan seems like nothing when you compare it to some of the antics of US comic Louis CK. Launching a brand-new primetime TV series with the sight of a lactating Bill Clinton suckling kittens at his teats? Posting a YouTube clip accusing the entire Catholic church of existing "solely for the purposes of boy rape"? Kicking off your stand-up set with a point-for-point comparison between Ray Charles and Hitler? Louis has done all of these, and he's not finished yet. Now there's another chance for us all to reap the benefits of his refreshingly foul tongue with the release of Hilarious, a confidently titled new album that easily lives up to its name, featuring more than an hour of his best stuff.

It's nigh on 25 years since Louis CK (his stage name is an easy-to-pronounce corruption of his actual surname, Szekely) first started performing stand-up in New York clubs. Like many leading US comics, he served time as a writer for David Letterman and Conan O'Brien. Since then, he's gained a reputation for producing massive cult hits that get cancelled almost immediately, such as The Dana Carvey Show (which spawned the Clinton breastfeeding scene mentioned above) and his own HBO show, Lucky Louie. If you ever get the chance to see this ultra-dysfunctional domestic sitcom, then do; it's a misanthropic loser classic to rival Curb Your Enthusiasm. In the UK, Louis is probably best known for his turn as Greg, sidekick to Ricky Gervais in The Invention Of Lying.

But despite all his TV and movie work, stand-up is Mr CK's lifeblood, and it's onstage where he comes out with his most challenging material. Hilarious features a number of faintly philosophical routines about social interaction and air travel, but it also contains wisecracks about the Holocaust and having sex with dead children. Louis says he doesn't believe there is "any realistic limit" to what you can say onstage, and that it's always worth breaking taboos if it's going to help you break interesting new ground. "There's a lot of people who've said things like, 'I wanted to fuck a dead kid in a field', and there's a lot of people who've made jokes about airplanes. But going from one to the other, the road that connects the two, that's a road less travelled. And I feel that when you take the road less travelled you're going to find stuff of value."

Louis offers a historical analogy for his approach to stand-up. "You know, Columbus didn't go to America because he was brave. He went there because he thought he might find stuff like tobacco and corn and shit that other people didn't have. And of course to give syphilis to a whole population." So in your set, you're metaphorically giving syphilis to the audience in the cause of comedy? "That's right. I'm killing natives."

'The most important role in my life is being a father … Thursday, Friday, I make their breakfasts, I take them to school, everything'

It's easy to think that comics like Louis come out with offensive material because notoriety sells. But according to him, if anything the reverse is true. "I look at some comedians that are clean, like Jim Gaffigan and I really envy a guy like that. Because simply by not using four of the million words available, he can literally play to 10 or a thousand times the audience I can. Because he doesn't say 'fuck', 'cunt' or 'shit', he can appeal to the maximum amount of people. You can bring your kids to a Jim Gaffigan show. I would love to have that. But I'm not that guy."

And that's something that's important to Louis CK: making sure he doesn't pretend to be someone else by staying true to his own ideals and principles. For all the cynicism and profanity of his stand-up act, there's a strong sense of personal morality that comes through, too. On Hilarious, he talks with some passion about what he feels is the right way to bring up kids: restricting the amount of TV they watch and trying to limit their exposure to other people's prejudices. As a divorced father who organises his life around his two kids, he's speaking from the heart.

"The most important role in my life is being a father," he says. "When I have my kids with me, I don't work. Thursday, Friday, I make their breakfasts, I take them to school, everything. I'm not saying that makes me better than everyone else; that's just my priorities."

In terms of comedy, Louis's priority right now is putting together the second season of Louie, the odd-shaped stand-up-cum-sketch-show-cum-sitcom he produces for the FX network. This bleakly funny portrayal of life as a suddenly single fortysomething is in some ways a reaction against the traditional sitcom format. Apart from Louis himself, there are no recurring characters, and no cheesy plot resolutions. FX has given him full creative freedom, and the result is a show that feels fresher because of its rough edges.

"I tend to shoot a lot of first drafts on my show," he says. "I think people like being surprised by what they see, and I like the audience being off-balance and not knowing where each episode is going to go. It's more fun to experience things when you don't know what's going to happen."

'When you shoot a movie with someone you spend a lot of time with them … Ricky Gervais and I sort-of compared notes as comedians'

Still, we can expect to see him back in the UK soon. He loves the crowds over here (especially on the Edinburgh fringe) and retains a special bond with one of our own big comic institutions, Ricky Gervais.

"I was blown away by The Office," admits Louis. "You burn with jealousy over something like that. I thought, 'That's just an incredible piece of comedy that I'll never be able to take part in.'"

However, after seeing clips of CK on YouTube, Gervais hired him to play his best friend in The Invention Of Lying. And the fictional friendship led to an offscreen bond.

"When you shoot a movie with someone you spend a lot of time with them," he says, "and we sort of compared notes as comedians; what we were doing onstage. Our friendship has grown from there." While Louis describes himself and Gervais as "kindred spirits", he thinks they have different strengths as comics. "Ricky's a great performer, he's very exact; he has goals onstage and he meets them. Most shows I do I get to about 45% of what I wanted to achieve."

That's typical of his relentless honesty, but Louis CK is being remarkably hard on himself. Because, on the evidence of Hilarious, his 45% is better than most people's 100.