Jen Kirkman Finds Material in the Single Life in ‘I’m Gonna Die Alone’

When the news broke that Chris Rock filed for divorce last year, a shameful thought momentarily popped into my head: I can’t wait to see his next special.

Divorce, let’s face it, can be a great subject for comedy. (It beats love any day.) On the “Tonight Show,” some of Johnny Carson’s funniest asides were about his failed marriages. Louis C. K. took a more straightforward approach, arguing that divorce is always good news. “No good marriage has ever ended in divorce,” he said.

Jen Kirkman goes further in her dynamite new Netflix special, “I’m Gonna Die Alone (And I Feel Fine).” She has made jokes about marriage in her previous work, but now that she is divorced, her act has the feel of that wonderful moment at the end of a party when you are left alone to gossip with your best friend about the horrible and ridiculous things that just went on. “They always tell you date men who love their mothers,” she said, shaking her head like a survivor. “No. No. Date men who don’t have their mothers anymore.”

Ms. Kirkman, a Boston-bred comic now based in Los Angeles, has been performing since the late 1990s, but this is her debut special. (She has recorded two stand-up albums.) She has emerged recently as a buzzed-about comic through touring, appearances on “Chelsea Lately” and “Drunk History,” and most of all, a compelling and diversified Internet presence that has drawn considerable notice in recent years.

With the kind of confessional and fearless personality built for social media, she has steadily expanded her profile through an intimate podcast, “I Seem Fun”; a frenetic Twitter presence; and a book, “I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids.” She adopts a slightly different style for each platform — her podcast is quieter, more thoughtful, her books chatty — but they all emerge from the same nervy and sly voice.

Her tweets probably have had the biggest impact. (She has 160,000 followers.) In a time when comedians seem increasingly and understandably cautious on Twitter, she seems as blunt as she does onstage. Ms. Kirkman isn’t just using the platform to promote. She regularly takes on jerks and their sexist remarks, making quick work of hecklers without the benefit of a microphone. For years, she’s been outspoken about the abuse female comics take online, even briefly quitting Twitter in 2012 because of it. More often, her strategy has been to engage, to fight back, even with other comics.

When Michael Che, joking online, played down criticism about catcalling, she sharply criticized him on Twitter. (He has since left that social media site.) Last week, she received some unwanted attention on this subject when Jezebel.com picked up a story about critical comments she made on her podcast about uncomfortable sexual advances from an unnamed top comic. Ms. Kirkman criticized the site for the story and took the episode offline.

Both on social media and onstage, however, Ms. Kirkman comes across as a happy warrior, a polemicist unafraid to show her silly side. She recently appeared on “Conan” and tap-danced on the host’s desk. Her new show displays a misanthropic streak that wouldn’t be out of place in a special by Doug Stanhope, and she has some strong material about turning 40 that, from a different performer, would feel sad sack. (“When a single woman dies alone, a cat appears.”)

But Ms. Kirkman makes getting older seem like a liberating return to the joys of jaded youth. After telling us she was that girl in school who dressed in black, smoked cigarettes and said, “Society sucks,” she pauses. “By the way, I was right,” she said. “I forgot along the way.”

Ms. Kirkman knows how to deliver a one-liner, but her inclination is to linger in the telling of a story. She digs into a subject, embroidering it with jokes at various angles. A huge number of her bits culminate in vivid metaphors. Somehow her ovaries become collapsible sweaters, and when talking about gray pubic hair, she evokes everything from a haunted house to an factory with mass layoffs.

Though delivered in an effortless conversational style, her comedy has the meticulous detail that can come only from repetition and experience. She has been working on some of these bits for years, including a masturbation joke about what to fantasize about. Her take, which included a lot of scenes involving Johnny Depp, involved a rambling series of riffs in her first album “Self Help” from 2007, but it’s become tight, dense with jokes and far more integrated into the rest of the show.

In comedy, experience helps, not just because it takes years to gain confidence and develop material. But also, especially for performers like Ms. Kirkman who lean on personal material, because your life provides essential material. Much of her special is structured like an argument for the pleasure of being single. She explains what’s wrong with marriage, then rebuts the idea that you need to get married to avoid dying alone by noting that women live longer anyway. She illustrates this with a lovely and obscene portrait of her grandmother, who died decades after her husband. She was found dead on her kitchen floor in a black bra and nothing else. It’s part of the accomplishment of this comedian that she persuasively imagines this as a hero’s death.

But Ms. Kirkman’s most convincing case is herself. As Larry David recently pointed out, divorce means that you can find new material about that most reliable of comedy subjects: dating. And Ms. Kirkman does not disappoint, telling a story about seeing a younger man days after her separation that she skillfully ties back into her skewering of parenting smugness. Her jokes argue for the fun of being single, but it’s the way she tells them that prove it.