(On Comedy)

The comic Jaboukie Young-White has a bit examining which bugs are gay.

Bees worship a queen, so of course. Ladybugs, he says, are clearly all lesbians. And when it comes to ants, he flashes a pensive look, his sleepy eyes opening wider as he asks, “You’re working so hard — what are you hiding?”

Then Young-White, 24, pauses, waiting for the joke to sink in. Typically, he moves from punch line to punch line with pace, but the two times I have seen him tell this one, he went silent as the laughter built. It’s a veteran move from a relative newcomer: When a joke glances off its target, as opposed to thumping it, he holds the silence to let you know the laugh is there if you look for it.

In the season premiere of the HBO series “Crashing,” on Sunday, Young-White plays a version of himself, a precocious comic with a herky-jerky delivery whom the star, Pete Holmes, persuades to come to New York, where he helps him gain entree to the club scene. But it’s a sign of how rapidly Young-White has risen that this plotline seems dated. Only a few months after he started work on “The Daily Show” in October, he headlined at Caroline’s, selling out five shows. It might not have seemed like it when “Crashing” hired him, but right now that series probably benefits from his glow more than the other way around.

While he hasn’t made a Netflix special, it’s probably only a matter of time, since Young-White, who has had nearly as much success writing (the Netflix series “Big Mouth” and “American Vandal”) as doing stand-up, has already developed the building blocks of a killer debut: sharp introductory jokes about his look and name (the stand-up version of a series pilot setting the scene), a clearly defined point of view that balances the prickly with the ingratiating, and an effortless star charisma that cannot be taught.

But it’s his craftsmanship that might be most impressive. He deftly delivers a punch line, but he’s even better at setting up a premise, careful not to get ahead of his audience, establishing the idea with the patience and conviction of a Broadway pro crying on cue years into a run.

The first indication that he was an unusually assured stand-up was his 2017 debut on “The Tonight Show,” where he opened with a joke about how, racially, he’s perceived differently from city to city. “When I’m in Chicago, people just think I’m half black, half white. When I’m in New York, people think that I’m Puerto Rican. But when I’m in CVS, everyone thinks I’m stealing.” Another long pause, over 10 seconds, as the crowd applauds, before he pivots: “It’s really frustrating, because I am.”

The joke established the perspective of a comic who pokes fun at racial pigeonholes and stereotypes while also being occasionally willing to play into them. “I don’t want to be the kind of comic who says black people are like this and white people are like that,” he said at one show, before doing just that.

In his first “Tonight Show” set, he also came out to his parents as gay. But it wasn’t only what he was saying that telegraphed an impressive ambition. It was his choice of clothes, a red leather jacket, nodding to the famous suit in “Delirious,” the breakthrough special of Eddie Murphy, then in his early 20s, perhaps the most spectacularly successful of all the stand-up prodigies.

Whereas Murphy began his career with jokes that presented gay men as silly, strange or even dangerous, Young-White is more likely to speak of a heterosexual couple as something alien. (“You’ve heard of those? It’s when a man and woman fall in love and go to Ikea.”) But he’s also not above telling a derivative joke.

Explaining how he is addicted to his phone, he describes a mugger asking him: “Is your phone worth your life?”

Young-White stares blankly: “I thought, Hmmm.”

Comedy nerds will notice the echo of Jack Benny’s classic joke about his own frugality. When a stickup artist demands, “Your money or your life!,” Benny answers, “I’m thinking it over!”

But as much as originality matters in stand-up, its importance is easy to exaggerate. As with magic tricks or story structures, there is a limited number of kinds of new jokes, but an infinite variety of ways to pull them off. What Young-White has done is update Benny for millennial comedy, leaning on a classic joke form to serve the perspective of a young person who lives much of his life staring at a screen.

On “The Daily Show,” he also leans into jokes about his age, playing the part of the Senior Youth Correspondent. But his sharpest social commentary is filtered through a personal prism. In between punch lines, Young-White narrates his own story, giving the audience a clear sense of his background, describing his Jamaican family with two brothers (one straight, one bisexual) growing up in Chicago where he was taught sex education by nuns in a Catholic school. As an adult, he lived in that city with seven roommates, including an actual gay man living in a closet (the setup to one of his better punch lines) before moving to Los Angeles just long enough to develop a loathing of it to bring to New York.

His stories position him as a struggling outsider, but not in a way that invites sympathy. Young-White can be cutting, but it’s always with a smile and an eye roll. There’s a carefree attitude to his comedy, a sense that even when faced with the most difficult or prejudiced situation, he can escape with a quick gibe. He has several stories about confrontations with homophobes, including one on a subway and another on Twitter, but they end with his defeating them with his quick wit.

When discussing his father’s lashing out after learning his son was gay, Young-White does not treat the event as overly dramatic. In his telling, he doesn’t return fire or build up the significance of the exchange. Instead, his response to his father is more unexpected, a kind of glib irritation: “You’re being such a queen right now,” he tells his dad, in a sing-songy voice. “This is kind of my moment.”

It certainly is.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.