When fans and advocates of Steve Dildarian speak admiringly of his distinctive voice, they are usually referring to the wry, resigned writing style that helped him get his new HBO animated series, “The Life & Times of Tim.” But his speaking voice probably helped too.

In person, it’s hard not to imagine Mr. Dildarian, 38, a former advertising copywriter who is the creator, writer and off-camera star of “Tim,” as the subject of a cartoon. He has the mildly disheveled look of a “Peanuts” character and wide, anime eyes, and when he speaks, in an adenoidal tone that evokes a blend of Ray Romano and Jim Henson, he often sounds as if he were stalling for time, even when he knows what he’s going to say.

Here, for example, is how he described in a recent interview the terrible day he spent working as a telemarketer, not long after graduating from college:

“I was selling, ahhh, meat — frozen meat that people would put in their basement freezer. If people do that, I guess they do. Ahhh. Calling and saying: ‘Hey, I’m Steve from Country Fresh Farm. Ahhh. You want to buy some frozen meat?’ ”

Now that he is well beyond such dead-end jobs, he has channeled that same halting delivery and “why me?” attitude into “Tim,” which had its premiere on Sunday. He provides the voice of the luckless but unflappable title character and subjects him to far greater indignities. When Tim attends a wedding, he somehow ends up lewdly groping the octogenarian grandmother of the bride. And when Tim’s girlfriend takes her parents home to meet him, they find him on the couch with an irate prostitute.

“I’m always looking to write something that just has so much conflict, it’s unbearable,” Mr. Dildarian explained.

Unlike his cartoon alter ego, Mr. Dildarian has enjoyed a life and a career relatively free of torment. His advertising portfolio includes many television commercials, like a back-to-school spot for Staples called “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” in which a father joyously tosses school supplies in a shopping cart as his dour-faced children look on.

He has also helped create several Super Bowl ad campaigns, including a Budweiser spot about a donkey who dreams of joining the Anheuser-Busch team of Clydesdales (for which Mr. Dildarian provided the voice of the donkey), and one with the Budweiser lizards scheming to get rid of the ubiquitous Budweiser frogs. The lizards “hated them so much, kind of like we did as writers,” Mr. Dildarian said.

On the side, Mr. Dildarian wrote a few conventional sitcom pilots, which were purchased by television networks but never produced. And he wrote a short script, called “Angry Unpaid Hooker,” about a boyfriend, a girlfriend and the title character, who won’t leave their apartment until she is compensated for her services.

Mr. Dildarian originally conceived of “Angry Unpaid Hooker” as a short film he would direct. But in 2005 he and a couple of friends recorded the dialogue after hours in a studio at Mr. Dildarian’s ad agency; Mr. Dildarian sketched a few crude doodles to accompany the audio, and his girlfriend, Leynete Cariapa, showed him how to animate the drawings using computer programs like QuickTime and iMovie. (Ms. Cariapa is now the co-executive producer and art director on “Tim.”)

In 2006 Mr. Dildarian entered the cartoon in the US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., at which it won the award for best animated short. The short quickly attracted interest from a formidable group of industry veterans, including the producer Jimmy Miller, who also manages Judd Apatow and Will Ferrell; and Tom Werner, who was an executive producer of “The Cosby Show” and “Roseanne.”

“The clarity of his voice stood out,” Mr. Werner said in a telephone interview. “You look at a show as well written as ‘The Office,’ but you get a sense that it’s written by a gang of people. This was the work of one person, and it was clear and clean and unique.” Mr. Werner said he could see the cartoon being turned into “an R-rated ‘Seinfeld.’ ”

With the help of his new admirers, Mr. Dildarian sold a pilot based on his short cartoon to Fox, but the network passed on the show for its 2007-8 season. Comedy Central offered to make a six-episode series, but Mr. Dildarian’s advisers and agents instead matched him with Media Rights Capital, a fledgling studio founded by Mordecai Wiczyk and Asif Satchu. “We had a lot of confidence that there would be networks that wanted it,” said Mr. Wiczyk, whose studio is also producing new animation projects from Seth MacFarlane (“Family Guy”) and Mike Judge (“King of the Hill”). “We weren’t certain whether they would permit Steve’s untrammeled voice to reach the audience.”

Mr. Dildarian was apprehensive about producing his series without a television channel to show it. “Believe me,” he said, “it’s not easy to hire people and say, ‘Oh, we’re making a show.’ ‘Oh, for who?’ ‘Nobody, we’re just making it ourselves. Trust me, someone’s going to want this.’ ”

But before he finished production on “Tim,” the show was picked up by HBO, which saw the cartoon as a descendant of uncomfortable, cover-your-eyes comedies like “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

“Tim is a very well-intentioned guy who gets himself in awkward, terrible situations,” said Sue Naegle, the recently appointed president of HBO’s entertainment division, who inherited the show from her predecessor, Carolyn Strauss, and HBO’s former chairman, Chris Albrecht. “There’s something about it that I think is very endearing, and we explore a lot of territory that’s similar to that.”

So far, several critics haven’t agreed: reviewing “Tim” in The Los Angeles Times, Robert Lloyd wrote, “I didn’t find much of it funny, but on a kind of purely analytical level I can see how the jokes are supposed to work.” And on Slate, Troy Patterson said “Tim” was not so much animated as “complacently sketched in a stab at slacker minimalism.”

As he completes work on the first season, Mr. Dildarian, who splits his time between Los Angeles and San Francisco, hasn’t changed his process much since the “Angry Unpaid Hooker” short. Each episode is minimally animated from his original designs (though he now has a team of artists and animators to do it for him), and he allows his voice actors to riff freely from his scripts (though he prefers to call this technique “extreme paraphrasing” rather than improvisation).

For all the abuse and embarrassment that he heaps on his two-dimensional surrogate, Mr. Dildarian sympathizes with Tim. “Sometimes it just seems like everyone in the world is crazy except you,” he said. “How can no one see the logic that I’m seeing?”

But mostly, Mr. Dildarian said, he enjoys putting Tim in impossible, unsolvable situations because he finds such scenes so easy to write. “It’s partly because I’m lazy, and partly because the work comes out better,” he said. “If anything’s hard to write, I don’t write it.”