In one of his remakes of viral Internet videos, comedian Daniel Tosh pretends to spend days trapped in an elevator with Nick White, whose 41 hours trapped in a midtown Manhattan elevator were chronicled by The New Yorker and posted on YouTube two years ago.

Reimagining the elevator car as a VIP party, Tosh points to White and brags to a woman, “That guy’s got over 5 million hits on YouTube!”

Tosh goads and mocks the stars of viral videos every week on “Tosh.0,” a Comedy Central series. But he acknowledges from time to time that they are stars and that his comedic gain relies on their pain. “These are people whose lives were changed because of a 15-second clip,” he says, pronouncing it bizarre.

With “Tosh.0,” Comedy Central has found a way to bring the spectacle of amateur Internet videos to television successfully. Each week Tosh lines up seven or eight videos and dispenses rapid-fire ridicule, mimicking the explicit comments that riddle the same videos on YouTube.

A great deal of the appeal is due to Tosh, 35, who has been honing his smirk on the stand-up circuit for more than a decade. He hosted a special for Comedy Central in 2003 and again in 2007, but it was not until 2008 that the network singled him out for a series of his own.

“They had the first idea that it should be an Internet clip show, sort of looking at pop culture and all areas of life through the lens of the Internet,” said Charlie Siskel, the show’s executive producer. “That was their master stroke, their brilliant idea. And Daniel was the guy to do it.”

Now he is indisputably the TV comedian of the moment. The first season of “Tosh.0,” in the summer of 2009, generated about a million viewers an episode. But the second season, this year, is averaging about 1.8 million viewers, peaking in late July with more than 2.6 million viewers.

“It just crept up,” Siskel said.

His high ratings this summer have generated headlines like “Move It, Stewart! Daniel Tosh Is the New King of Comedy,” from the website of NBC’s “Today” show. While true that “Tosh.0” is now attracting more viewers than “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” the comparison is misleading because “Tosh.0” produces a new episode only once a week.

Tosh flatly denies any interest in having a daily show of his own. In September he is embarking on a 40-city, 60-day national tour, and then he is resuming “Tosh.0,” with 30 episodes already ordered for its third season, set to begin Jan. 12. He comes across as someone who, though famous, still feels genuinely grateful and maybe even a little lucky. “My sole dream currently is to keep the show on the air,” he said.

The show is a rat-a-tat-tat series of video clips and jokes that are obscene, shocking, even scatological. Some clips earn their own segments, like “Web Redemption,” which features people like White who are Internet-notorious. (Sped-up security camera footage of his 41 hours in the elevator has now been viewed 6 million times on YouTube, and it has spawned spoof videos.)

“Tosh.0” is, at its heart, a clip show. “But it’s not that Daniel grew up wanting to be the next Bob Saget,” Siskel said, referring to the host of the classic ABC clip show “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” “We basically just use the Internet as a way to do jokes, jokes that we would be doing even if the show had a different format.”

Here’s Tosh’s checklist for video bait:

1. “Somebody really getting hurt.”

2. “Short.”

3. “Legal to put on TV.”

4. “Good quality.”

Quality, in reference to the pixels on screen, is not an afterthought. “So many videos are shot with a cell phone, it’s awful,” Tosh said, repeating his preference for high-definition video, the better to show the pain rendered on the subject.

“As long as it’s short,” he added.

Shows are filmed Thursdays, and they run the following Wednesday at 10:30 p.m.

Tosh said the videos were judged on a case-by-case basis by a standards and practices department at Comedy Central. “We have all agreed that if they make a blanket rule, that will be the death of them,” he said. He estimated that 95 percent of his chosen videos end up cleared for the broadcast. (Someday, he suggested, there might be a “don’t try this at home” warning attached to the show, just as there was for the MTV series “Jackass.” Some videos on ComedyCentral.com are preceded by a reminder that they are intended for mature audiences.) The show asserts fair use laws to replay most of the Internet clips for no fee.

Tosh is relentless in his interaction with fans, even the ones who violently insult him on Twitter and on Comedy Central’s website. He shrugs at the insults. “It’s the Internet,” he said.

It’s the Internet that allowed him to nurture his fan base, but it’s television that catapulted him in front of millions of fans almost overnight. TV, he said, “makes a huge difference.”

He added, laughing, “It shows you how meaningless the Internet really is.”

‘Tosh.0’

When: 10:30 tonight

Where: Comedy Central