Sometimes, when people lament the lack of decent new music on the radio, they assert there’s no decent new music being made anywhere and suggest some societal reason for the problem. But that’s silly. There’s always good stuff being produced somewhere, and if at times the national spotlight never focuses on that good stuff, it says more about the distribution and consumption of media than it does of any systematic creative failure.

The same is certainly true in standup comedy. Louis CK has been doing this for a long time, no? He has always been funny. He has even had TV shows before. So while certainly he has honed his art and improved with time, I’d guess the fact that he’s now blowing up toward superstardom says as much about us as it does about him. And that probably speaks pretty well of humanity.

If you missed it, Louis CK released his most recent standup special through his website a few weeks ago. He charged only five dollars for it, made it easy to purchase even though he understood that would make it easy to pirate, and asked people to pay for it even though he realized there were plenty of ways to avoid doing so. A couple weeks later, he had brought in over a million dollars in sales — over a quarter of which he donated to charity.

The DIY ethic, the straightforwardness and the deep-seated decency highlighted by the experiment and its outcome all fit with Louis/Louie’s on-screen and on-stage persona: He’s the most lovable of losers, ever-frustrated with b.s., smart but often overwhelmed. And he often buries beneath several layers of hilarious cynicism some real hope, love and wonderment.

And I suspect Louis CK’s recent run of success implies that a lot of us identify with him these days. It’s a tough time to be a loser because it’s always a tough time to be a loser — that’s what being a loser means, after all.

But maybe all that has been done to expose the plight of the loser, plus the forums now available to all of us and the way Charlie Sheen has forever stigmatized “winning” combine to provide hope that we can overcome the various factors that keep us losers and harness our talents and the current zeitgeist to establish some sort of hour of the losers. It seems to be working for Louis CK, after all.