There are two ways the scenes end in Portlandia, which begins its third season tonight on IFC. The first way, which is the most fun, is by going faster and faster, with the joke building and building to a frantic explosion. The other way is with a disaffected end on a line that seemingly shouldn't matter. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen are way, way too cool for punchlines. And the particular type of comedy they've developed in this show doesn't need them. It doesn't even need to be funny. Like New Yorker cartoons, the basic emotion that Portlandia generates isn't laughter or amusement but a sense of recognition, of being understood. You are going to enjoy the show exactly insofar as you see yourself in it.

Fortunately, or unfortunately maybe, I see a lot of myself in Portlandia. I have actually eaten a chicken that had a name, though his name was not Colin. One of the earliest bits in season three of Portlandia begins with a character who goes to rehab to overcome his addiction to pasta. As I sat down to watch it, I had, in my hands, a big bowl of spaghetti bolognese, which I was eating with deep feelings of pasta shame. The experience was weird, like vertigo. When, in another bit, a tweener at MTV says, "Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are divorced, and you're all their orphan children," I thought, yep, that pretty much sums it up. I literally have a pillow on my couch that has a bird stitched on it.

Portlandia is often described as hipster comedy. That's such a loaded word now that you can pretty much use it for anyone who isn't consciously trying to be boring and whom you don't like. In the case of Portlandia, it really is inappropriate. What Armisen and Brownstein are exploring are the end results of the alternative culture that began in the nineties, and which essentially consumed itself to a place of utter predictability. Alternative culture began as a response to globalization, which put the same stores and the same restaurants and the same movies and the same music in every city in the world. At the moment, you can buy the same stuff in the high streets of London or in an outlet mall in Kansas. Anyone who had or who has any interest at all in originality was stranded. The stranded had no choice but to move to the margins. One of the places on the margins was Portland.

What happened next was that the resistant margins to the globalized mainstream culture became as homogenous as the mainstream. The stranded people on the margins founded bands and coffeeshops and local restaurants. They made movies, too. And each of these communities, supposedly hyper-local, supposedly particular and fountains of originality, became very much the same. The show is called Portlandia, but its description of life will be recognizable to people well beyond Portland; the exact same world exists in Brooklyn and Omaha and Nashville and Silver Lake and Toronto and Berlin. The predictability of the alternative scene is what Portlandia skewers: people who take up shell art and then abandon it when it becomes too popular. Mayors who play bass in reggae bands. Militant cyclists. Bad artists who put their paintings on café walls.

The problem, which Portlandia understands so intimately, is that the search for originality, the quest to be marginal, is inherently hypocritical. The alternative isn't really alternative anymore. The attempt at difference inevitably fails. So many people go to coffeeshops in Portland that there's a caffeine pocket in the Pacific Ocean. I'm not even kidding. The easy answer is to call everybody a hipster and go back to some mass-cultural macho pose and be done with it.

But this, too, is no solution. Even if it's ridiculous, chickens with names taste better than chickens without names. The best bands live in this false alternativeness. The best writers also live in this phony alternativeness. The alternative to the alternative is Ke$ha and "Gangnam Style" and eating at Outback Steakhouse. What are you going to do?

The beauty of Portlandia is that it shows the terrible labyrinth of cool, but then it also shows the way out. The way out is Carrie Brownstein. Her fresh and open and cool beauty are glorious, but her gentleness, above all, is so appealing. She is someone who has managed to remain human despite the cultural forces that want her to be either inside or outside. No one is truly hurt by the mockery of Portlandia. The ironies of the nineties, and the ever-more-minute drawing of distinctions that followed, could be vicious. Portlandia is funny, but it's also kind. This is its true novelty. Armisen and Brownstein see behind the self-presentation of their characters, but they also know the truth that the failure of alternative culture has revealed: We're all pretending. We all have to put on a face. We may as well enjoy it.

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PLUS: Kyle MacLachlan on Portlandia and His Many Characters

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Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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