“Veep,” HBO’s new comedy starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as vice president of the United States, has an awful lot of cursing in it. Too much, perhaps: if you fear the de-electrification and eventual domestication of swear words, you may feel that “Veep” takes us a little farther down that road. On the other hand, political people do swear. They have to, for their mental health. Today’s public servant is gaffe-phobic, linguistically constipated, mortgaged in spirit to this lobby or that. He must speak — when on display — in ceaseless, toneless platitudes. Then the heavy door closes, with the press and the people on the other side of it, and the air splinters with profanity.


So Vice President Selina Meyer swears her head off, as do all the members of her staff. And they have a great deal to swear about, because it’s not easy being veep.


As the first episode begins, on Sunday night, Selina is throbbing with a fresh and bold initiative: “If I can get corn starch utensils in most federal buildings by the fall — well then, the veep has landed!” She struts, she is animated. It’s “classic clean-jobs stuff.” An aide bounces puppyishly beside her, waving a corn starch fork.


But then a premature tweet from one of her “internerds” arouses the plastics lobby — faceless, oppressive — which naturally would prefer that the utensils in federal buildings remain plastic. Confusion ensues, support drops away: seconds before Selina takes the podium to deliver her corn starch speech, it gets a tough edit from the White House. Whole paragraphs are redacted. “That’s the entire speech, O.K.?” she quivers. “What’s left here? I have ‘Hello,’ and I have ... prepositions.”


“Veep” is the creation of Armando Iannucci, the satirically inclined Scot whose hits on British television include “The Day Today” (a spoof news program that anticipated “The Daily Show”) and the sitcom “The Thick of It” (hard-core political swearing); he is also responsible for the film “In the Loop” (even more hard-core political swearing). One of the “Veep” executive producers is the former New York Times columnist Frank Rich, a circumstance that might lead some viewers to expect a political statement from the show — a caricature, a comment. But the show’s interest is in power, or the lack of it.


Selina, for example, seems to have no power at all. She motorcades around in a flutter of police lights; she entourages importantly down hallways; but her plans and designs come to nothing. Certain hours of the day find her “spinning,” i.e., rotating dreamily in her swivel chair, for long periods. Her staff knows better than to disturb her at such moments.


The president’s Godot-like absence-presence (“Sue, did the president call?” “No,” goes the running joke) adds a vaguely existential dimension: Might we all, in a sense, be veeps, permanent understudies, dashing hither and thither while awaiting the big call-up? Gravely informed, in one episode, that the president is experiencing severe chest pains — that her time of accession, in other words, may be at hand — Selina is unable to suppress a smile of pure birthday cake glee. “I’m so ... sorry...,” she manages.


Mr. Iannucci has made a specialty of the way political people talk to one another, and the dialogue in “Veep” has a rapid-fire, clickety-clackety cleverness that American viewers will associate with “The West Wing” — cranked up comedically, of course. We hear about Potus, for example, and his wife, Flotus, and even their dog (or soon-to-be dog) Fdotus. “Come on,” Selina says in Episode 2, “let’s go somewhere, let’s meet the public!”


“You want to normalize it?” asks Mike (Matt Walsh), her director of communications.


“Yes, exactly, I want to meet some regular normals! Where are we going to find them?”


Mike exults: “Photo op with the normals and the normalistas!”


Conversations are swerving, multibranched, happening two or three at a time. The aides, when together, appear to have evolved beyond the need for eye contact — they look down, thumbs squirming over BlackBerrys.


Ms. Louis-Dreyfus, as we all know, is a great comic actor. To the role of Selina Meyer she brings the full battery of her art: she throws fits, she gets distracted, she is swarmed upon by multiplying humiliations. When an especially large or significant thought occurs to her, she puts a kind of psychic stutter in the middle of the scene.


And (to return to the swearing thing) a certain release comes in seeing Elaine from “Seinfeld” cursing up a storm. So much of “Seinfeld” was repressed verbal violence, almost swearing, on the edge of swearing.


The opening scenes of a new sitcom are always faintly embarrassing, as the characters bustle forward overvividly to introduce themselves: it’s like watching a musical. But “Veep” looks as if it might settle quite nicely. The supporting cast is very strong — Tony Hale (perhaps best known for “Arrested Development”), in particular, excels as Selina’s goofy and limpetlike personal aide — the various internecine plotlines are building well; and no one is allowed to riff uncontrolled.


“I’m the new face of the veep’s office, O.K.?” hisses a horribly ambitious young man at a frowning journalist. “I can bring you major scoops!”


“You can bring me major scoops?”


“Hey, c’mon, I major in major.”


“Stop doing that,” the journalist says.


Veep


HBO, Sundays nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.


Created by Armando Iannucci. Mr. Iannucci, Frank Rich and Christopher Godsick, executive producers; Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche, co-executive producers; Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Stephanie Laing, producers; Sean Gray, William Smith, Roger Drew and Ian Martin, consulting producers.


WITH: Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Selina Meyer), Tony Hale (Gary), Anna Chlumsky (Amy), Matt Walsh (Mike), Reid Scott (Dan), Timothy C. Simons (Jonah) and Sufe Bradshaw (Sue).