Louis C.K. is describing his departure from his upstate New York home for a cross-country blitz to hype his new HBO comedy, "Lucky Louie." He had kissed his two little girls and told his wife goodbye.

"I told her, 'I'm really scared, all this stuff I'm about to do,' " he recalls for a reporter later that day in Manhattan. "And she's going, 'You're really leaving us in the lurch.'

"Then she kind of squinted at me: 'Oh, you're trying to express your feelings. You sure you have time for this now?' "

Welcome to Louis' world, which, with some creative alterations (and a spelling tweak of his character's name), yields "Lucky Louie," a domestic sitcom in the tradition of "The Honeymooners" but with HBO-sanctioned frankness.

"Lucky Louie," which premiered last week and airs Sundays at 7:30 p.m., stars the balding red-haired comic (who was a charter member of Conan O'Brien's writing staff and an Emmy-winning writer for "The Chris Rock Show") as a muffler-shop mechanic and family man.

His tiny, tough wife, Kim (played by Pamela Adlon), is a nurse who serves as the family breadwinner. They have a 4-year-old daughter, Lucy (Kelly Gould), who, like non-TV kids, is sweet, fussy, a chatterbox or in tears, depending on the moment — and who in one scene last week plied her father with so many "why" questions that finally he answered, "Because God's dead and we're alone." Which satisfied her.

His show, like his stand-up act, isn't so much an exercise in full-frontal jest as an effort to puzzle out some logic, however twisted, to the cards life deals us all. Louie's expectations are low, his dreams past their expiration date. He has no designs on changing the world. He'd just like to get a better handle on it.

"I think he's just a guy who's trying to get through life, that's all," Louis muses. "Most people don't have any control over the elements in their lives, especially when they don't have a lot of money. You're with somebody, and you try to maintain that, and the rest of it becomes No Choices, led by circumstance."

On this week's episode, for instance, Louie serendipitously helps his wife to her first-ever orgasm. But soon the downside becomes evident: Louie is duty-bound to do it again.

"On a later show, the toilet is broken and the super won't fix it. So we try to talk Lucy back into wearing diapers." Such is the humor and headaches.

Growing up in Newton, Mass., with three sisters, a single mom and the Hungarian surname Szekely (which boils down phonetically to "C K"), the 38-year-old Louis remembers "telling large stories a lot, I used to tell a lot of lies. But my mother didn't want to discourage it, 'cause she thought it was a creative urge."

But now, he explains, "No matter how big my career gets, in the end, all I'm really doing is taking time away from my family. I'm still just a guy who's pissing off my wife."