Alive another day, Louis C.K. kills at Chicago Theatre

In the comedy world of the moment, Louis C.K. is basically the Beyonce, the iconoclast who mastered the mainstream and now gets to create and distribute his art on his own terms. He can make a highly personal, soul-searching TV series, “Horace & Pete,” and spring it on the world with little advance word, “Lemonade” style. He can take his starmaking vehicle, “Louie,” and put on the shelf indefinitely, Destiny’s Child style. And he can make contributions to a genre dense with fluff and know they’ll be taken seriously.

In his current four-night stand at the Chicago Theatre, part of a tour announced just three weeks ago, C.K. is performing fresh material that’s very much in keeping with his style. Like Queen Bey, he’s thinking about the dark side of relationships, but also about his parents, his own parenting and lots of petty annoyances. (And not a word about the weirdest presidential election of our generation. That’s left for opener Michelle Wolf, who on Tuesday noted that Hillary Clinton is such a deflating figure, her name is the ideal safe word.)

If there’s a recurring theme to this set, it’s mortality, already heavy on the mind of the man who twice reminds us he’s 48. A mention of marriages that last decades quickly progresses to the spouses’ inevitable deaths, and the reunions in heaven that may follow, unhappily. Suicide comes up more than once as an appealing option, a great way to solve your stupid problems. If that’s too radical, try a nap: “You can kill yourself and then take it back.”

In what he labeled his “easily seventh favorite city, maybe fourth,” C.K. is bringing his A game, wearing a suit (not the T-shirt of a loose night of riffing) and doing a set that’s clearly been honed and sculpted. He’s performing with energy and polish. He digresses, but intentionally, it seems, and he always finds his way back.

The material is all solid, all over the place but delivered with logic and coherence. Some of is just masterful, especially a chunk about a compelling moment in the “Magic Mike” trailer and the feelings it elicits in him. When he gets into what it must be like to teach math in the public schools, he spells out the horrors in an amusing, Newhart-like back-and-forth using banal detail to unpack the ignominy of trying to shape young, uncooperative minds.

But C.K. gets silly, too, at times switching his voice to a grotesque ethnic stereotype. It’s horribly offensive, he admits, but it’s fun, too, especially as a device for confusing his kids. After one stretch of egregious, high-pitched, ’70s soul brother patter, he offers, “I didn’t mean to offend any Chinese people.”

Dependably candid, C.K. also gets into some racy realms here, explicitly describing the conception of his daughters and recalling his kid’s-eye view of the urination troughs at ballparks. That’s to be expected from the man always willing to assess the whims of his emotions, his instincts and his hormones. The Louhive wouldn’t have it any other way.