Like a gay whoring republican scandal there isn’t anything that could crush Louis C.K.’s career worse than if his ex-wife stood up and said that he wasn’t a good father. “Yeah," she could say, “he’s never around, doesn’t give a shit. The kids aren’t even his.”

This is because C.K.’s act, his television show and his theatrical comedy film “Hilarious” (released on September 8^th for a one night screening) mostly hinge on the premise that he’s divorced, 42, has two daughters and is trying his best. It is this core of good intention which gives him licence to roam free verbally about what assholes his kids are. His conceit, sketched out first in his break-through 2005 special “Shameless”, is that he loves them to depths he could never have imagined, but they’ve ruined his life.

In "Funny People", Judd Apatow’s lumpy yet periodically exceptional flick of a comic with cancer, Adam Sandler berates Seth Rogen for being part of a generation where parents only got divorced and didn't abuse their kids. He laments that this new generation won’t understand proper pain and therefore will be less funny. It’s a pretty astute observation – made ironic because as Sandler suffers medically in the film all his stand-up riffs consist of dick jokes. However, it’s how you tell those jokes about suffering that’s important. Though sexless marriage and single parenting is tediously well-worn terrain for comics the hope, and freshness, in C.K.’s act is from such a perfectly formed depiction of a man coping and growing from being a parent. One of his best bits is a shrill acknowledgement that upon becoming a father he realised that by comparison to his baby he wanted to ask his wife: “Who the fuck are you? You’re just a stranger.”

For a generation that knows that single-parenting is a real possibility in the next ten years or so, with the person they’re with or someone they haven’t even met, then C.K. is giving you a veritable cheat-sheet. He’s depicting an updated stereotype of a single dad with an honesty that isn’t hokey and in its bleakness is uplifting. As his marriage has decayed and imploded over the course of his HBO specials he has been upfront with how his kids come way before his wife, his relationship or himself. He doesn’t express hope, at least with words, at any moment, but the encouragement is there because you don’t feel like he’s hiding anything. There are show-stopping moments like when he talks about removing shit from his one daughter’s vagina, but the most viciously hilarious is when he admits how boring a young girl’s stories are, how he really doesn’t care what she has to say. It’s poignant because you know how he’d like to care and also like to scamper, but is incapable of either.

His humour, like most comics, comes from voicing what we all go through alone every day. Though we’re not going to stop conceiving and divorcing it feels that a few strands of language have been created for the single male parent. The hope is in the possibility of solidarity. The short-hand of “It’s just like in that Louis C.K. bit,” though possibly not earmarking a good experience will be better than nothing for the next wave of divorcee Dads.

“Louie” is on FX at11pm on a Tuesday.

“Hilarious” will have one night in selected cinemas on Sept. 8th and be on Epix from Sept. 18.