How stressful is it to launch a new late-night show right now? This stressful: at a test show just days before The Opposition was set to debut on Comedy Central, host Jordan Klepper revealed that the day before, he had put on a shirt that fit him perfectly the previous week. Now, though, the collar was loose. “I’ve lost an inch around my neck,” Klepper said.

The former Daily Show correspondent will hit the airwaves on Monday with a new program called The Opposition w/ Jordan Klepper. In his new solo venture, he’ll embody a version of the buffoonish, painfully white dude he honed for three years on his old stomping grounds—but with a few subtle adjustments. On The Daily Show, Klepper was an excellent and malleable foil; sometimes he played liberal, sometimes conservative, depending on the demands of the segment. His new character will have the same outsize confidence, but a more stable philosophical grounding.

“This is somebody who is going to tell you that ‘they’re’ doing it wrong, but he doesn’t quite know who ‘they’ are,” Klepper said during an interview with V.F.com ahead of the show’s debut. “That, to me, is a little bit of what the Internet is; it’s troll culture. It’s like, ‘I can be against this story!’ ‘What is that story?’ ‘Well, I’m against it because I’m a rebel; I’m anti-mainstream.’ “

You can see that approach in the show’s early promo clips, including one in which Klepper’s character not-so-gracefully side-steps identifying that mysterious “them.”

The conceit is an of-the-moment spin on The Colbert Report, where Stephen Colbert thrived during Bill O’Reilly’s heyday. But unlike Colbert, Klepper’s character is informed by fringe conservatism. He’ll be akin to Alex Jones—a spin on the old “Jordan Klepper” character featuring “20 percent more paranoia,” Klepper explained, “where suddenly it’s all about the deep state and rogue agitators.”

It’s easy to see the appeal from a comedian’s point of view; fringe folk are inherently ridiculous, and ripe for parody. But to Comedy Central’s liberal-leaning viewers—and judging from the network’s programming, that seems to be the bulk of its audience—that premise might sound a bit exhausting. Is a show that mimics, and maybe amplifies, media’s worst scourges really what anyone wants to watch right now, when the real world is absurd enough?