NEW YORK — On a recent weeknight, Jim Gaffigan arrived at the Gotham Comedy Club to do an unannounced 22-minute set. He had no choice. His latest comedy special (his 10th), “Jim Gaffigan: Dark Pale,” was set to premiere July 25 on Amazon’s Prime Video, and that meant new material would be needed.

“Once that special is released, you really can’t do the same show because people are like, you know, we just saw that on TV,” says his wife, Jeannie Gaffigan, his producer and sometimes writer. So, new gigs are already lined up, including a four-city tour with Jerry Seinfeld.

On this night, Gaffigan, who rides atop virtually every “funniest family-friendly comedians” list, opens with a chunk about his children — he has five, ages 10 to 19 — that doesn’t exactly give off a kids-say-the-darndest-things vibe.

“I am so grateful that I can do stand-up comedy,” Gaffigan starts. “But I do need you to know that my life at home is horrible. It is hell.”

Gaffigan talks about discovering, mid-conversation, that the child he’s speaking to is leaving the room. He grouses about getting called fat and bald for merely suggesting a coat be worn in cold weather. He imagines telling his therapist about his children without mentioning that they are indeed his children.

“I live with these five people,” he says. “They eat all my food, spend all my money, and when I ask them to do anything, they yell at me. Any therapist would be like, ‘You should move out.’”

This is the beauty of Gaffigan, quietly one of the most successful comics of his generation. He is constantly Wiki-typed as the clean comic, as if he’s as bland as a slice of bologna, and yet he is never afraid to venture into the unexpected.

“Clean. I know that term,” Seinfeld says in a phone interview. “I don’t think it means much. I mean, in the comedy world it’s, is this guy funny? Nobody goes, ‘Is he clean?’”

There is also never a sense that, at 57 and decades into his career, Gaffigan is done developing. In his opening bit at the Gotham, for example, he referenced his 13-year-old daughter, Maria. Except that he doesn’t have a 13-year-old daughter named Maria. It’s a small liberty to take, but it offers a window into one shift in Gaffigan’s thinking: how to fit his real family into the family material he’s become so famous for. There was a time when he would welcome a TV crew into the kitchen or conduct an interview with a baby strapped to his chest. Then there was the YouTube show he and Jeannie launched during the pandemic, “Dinner with the Gaffigans.”

“Dinner” was popular and helped raise money for a variety of charities. But it began to make him feel uneasy and, these days, more protective. He mentions getting a call from an adviser.

“And he goes, there’s an opportunity for your family to meet this other family,” Gaffigan says in a recent interview. “They’re kind of like TikTok famous but they want to be YouTube famous. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, that sounds good.’”

Then he thought about it some more. What a terrible idea.

“At a certain point, our oldest daughter was like, I just don’t want to be on camera anymore,” Jeannie adds. “We realized, ‘Wait, this is not correct. These aren’t actors. They’re our children.’”

Those children also inspired what remains one of the least Gaffiganian moments in his public life.

Three summers ago, during the Republican National Convention, Gaffigan got so fed up with then-President Donald Trump that he went on a Twitter rant peppered with misspellings and the “F word.” The National Catholic Reporter declared it “the night that broke Jim Gaffigan.” Some commenters told him they were disappointed and would no longer follow him. He had a direct message for one of them. Again, it began with an F.

Three years later, Gaffigan says the rant, in which he called Trump a “traitor,” “con man” and “thief,” was motivated, in part, by his children.

“I’m living with these teenagers, and what am I going to say to them,” he says. “I know Trump is bad news, but I didn’t want it to interfere with my money?”

To hear Gaffigan’s brother Joe describe it, there was very little reason to imagine Jim Gaffigan would ever deliver a punchline. Their father, Michael, was a banker and the first in his family to attend college. Growing up in Indiana, Jim played football and agreed he would measure success in getting a job in which he wore a tie. After earning a degree in finance from Georgetown University, he headed to Florida for a job as a litigation consultant.

“He tried to make a go of it,” says Joe, one of five older siblings. “He bought himself a Fiero, but a pale Jim in Tampa is not a good combination. He didn’t have a lot of friends there and realized, this is not going to work.”

In his mid-20s, he also lost his mother, Marcia, to ovarian cancer when she was just 53. That inspired him to try stand-up.

“I kind of essentially did what everyone told me to do,” Gaffigan says. “Like play football. I don’t even like football. But I’ll go out and then study finance. And so the passing of my mother was very much like, ‘Wait a minute. Hold on. What is all this? This isn’t fair.’”

He moved to New York and, after a short time at an advertising agency, was laid off. He decided to focus on comedy.

“I really thought, okay, I can do this; get 10 or 15 minutes and then maybe I’ll become a writer on ‘Letterman,’” he says.

In 2003, he and Jeannie got married. She was an actress who had already been working with him, starting when he needed help producing a comedy CD, “Luigi’s Doghouse.” They would go on to collaborate on his specials and “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TV Land.

What changed everything was “Hot Pockets,” a riff on the microwaveable turnovers that are considered a staple of the single-guy life. Gaffigan was inspired by a commercial he saw for the preservative-packed snack and adapted it for his 2006 special, “Beyond the Pale.”

“Hot Pockets” is not Gaffigan’s best bit or even the best bit in “Beyond the Pale,” but it helped solidify his standing as a dad-bod, everyman hero. But “Hot Pockets” also proved his staying power. Gaffigan had long admired Dave Attell, George Carlin and Seinfeld, comics who almost religiously developed new material. His most famous bit would have to go.

“So, he was like, ‘I didn’t want to be the Hot Pocket guy but this has completely changed my tax bracket, right?’” Jeannie says.

“For a while, he would do it as the curtain call. Come back and say, ‘Sorry, I had to leave for a minute and have a Hot Pocket,’ and everyone would go crazy. That went on for a couple of years until he was like, ‘I’m ready to let go of Hot Pockets.’”

After the Gotham appearance, Gaffigan, in a booth at a restaurant next door, pulls out a stack of scripts from his bag. The typed pages are marked up with different colored pens to show word changes, ideas for pacing and audience responses. Gaffigan records every performance on his phone and will listen back, hearing where a line fell flat, took off or could use a nudge. Then he scribbles.

“That’s the work ethic that separates the great comedians from the good comedians,” says Ted Alexandro, who has been opening for Gaffigan for years. “Arriving at the theater two hours early so that he can work over not just one week, one month or one year but, you know, 30 years is what creates someone that is about to release his 10th comedy special.”

Seinfeld says that obsessiveness, the desire to always try to figure out what will work onstage, is part of what makes Gaffigan special.

“I’ve been a comedian for 47 years, and over that time, I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of comedians,” Seinfeld says. “And I would say over 99% of them are not doing comedy anymore. The number one reason is how difficult it is to sustain this profession over many, many years. And the reason that some sustain and some don’t, you might think it has to do with how funny they are, but it actually isn’t. It’s that there are people that are so committed to it, they’re so in love with it and they’re so dedicated. We’re obsessed with it. We don’t even think about anything else.”

That’s only partially true. Gaffigan is obsessed with comedy, but he also wants to do more dramatic acting. He has branched out to pull off starring roles in independent films (the 2022 sci-fi drama “Linoleum”) as well as smaller, but memorable parts in larger productions. His latest, as a U.S. mail police supervisor in Steven Soderbergh’s “Full Circle” limited series on Max, has earned praise. He also played a pedophile in an episode of “Law and Order: SVU.”

“He’s fearless, and there was never a sense that he was trying to protect anything,” Soderbergh says in a phone interview. “And that’s key. If you’ve got any part of you that is not willing to jump off the cliff and is worried about how it’s going to look or how it may be perceived, then you’re not going to succeed. I think the dichotomy that he’s operating under is, is it good or is it not good? And if it’s good, I want to do it.”

“Dark Pale” is, as the title promises, not all smiles. There is a lengthy section about death, in which Gaffigan imagines his own funeral and pitches the audience on a reality show that involves a corpse and a cake.

“I remember being shocked at how dark it is,” says Jeannie, an executive producer on the special.

For Gaffigan, it’s part of a progression that’s been partially influenced by the pandemic. He believes that COVID-19 changed everything and everyone, some for better, some for worse. He contemplates how our children have been altered by canceled classes, ever-present masks and political debates about the pros and cons of a lifesaving vaccine.

At the end of the special, during the credits, he shares photos of friends and family members who have died, some many years ago. These include his parents and a pair of comedian friends, Greg Giraldo, who died in 2010, and Angela “Shecky Beagleman” Muto, who died last year.

After the cake bit, Gaffigan tells the audience, “This is usually the point when people ask, when are you going to do the food jokes?” Then, after barely a beat, he delivers: “Dead or cake is a food joke.”