Katya Zamolodchikova is a lot like a genderfluid Energizer Bunny—she keeps going and going and going, honey. The industrious drag queen (who is the demented Russian stage persona of Brian McCook) may have placed fifth on RuPaul__’ s Drag Race, but she’s been nothing but a winner since. After narrowly surviving the brutal Drag Race rodeo, she racked up over one million Instagram followers, launched her own stage show entitled Help Me, I__’__m Dying, and nearly won Drag Race All Stars 2. But of all her post-Drag Race achievements, perhaps the greatest was the creation of UNHhhh , her absurdist YouTube talk show, co-starring fellow Drag Race alum Trixie Mattel. Since its inception just one year ago, UNHhhh has racked up over 36 million views on YouTube, and inspired VICELAND to adapt the web show into a full television series premiering November 15 , and represents, as Katya so eloquently put it, “the culmination of a year and a half of knowing this stupid whore, Trixie Mattel.”

To say I had a “conversation” with Katya would misrepresent the experience; a more appropriate description of our encounter would be “maniacal, verbal ping-pong match.” Even out of drag, McCook maintains the same level of frenzied brilliance as his onstage character, and it is quite the challenge to keep up with him, as he zips from topic to topic, skewering each subject with his ferocious wit, dragging you along for the wild ride. Over the course of our interview, McCook’s mile-a-minute commentary hits on the societal dangers of social media (“The next Joel Osteen, mega-church, evangelist-piece-of-shit-hypocrite-motherfucker will be self-made through Youtube”), his feelings on Sarah Huckabee Sanders (“She’s Princess Fucking Dickwad”), and his preferred slang for describing ambitious masturbation (“Pulling the padge, like you’re working for a girl scout badge!”). In the end, the line between Katya Zamolodchikova and Brian McCook is a tenuous one, their identities blurring together into one trippy, genderfucked super-persona, which may be the very point of McCook’s whole project.

But long before McCook became a quick-witted, tv-show-having, Russian drag queen, he was just another nice Catholic boy, growing up in the suburbs of Boston. McCook was blessed with supportive, loving parents, though suburbia was not exactly McCook’s idea of a good time. “I didn’t get called a faggot too much,” he quips. “Just a few times!” McCook graduated from Marlborough High School in 2001, and after attending Boston University for a year, decided to transfer to Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he studied video and performance art. In his final year of art school, he discovered the character of Katya. “I hosted a video show for my senior portfolio, to say, ‘Look—I did work while I was here!’ I had started learning Russian on a whim and I loved it, so I hosted the show as a Russian character in drag.”

The rest, as RuPaul says, is herstory. Katya quickly became a staple in the local Boston drag scene, making her way up through the ranks at drag venue Jacques Cabaret, which she also lived above for seven years. When I ask McCook to describe the Katya of yore, he doesn’t miss a beat: “Oh my god, she was a full-tilt, full-time transvestite hooker at large. Like, for real. Like, entertaining johns and gentlemen in her little pied-à-terre downtown, and then sliding down the fire-fucking-pole and punching the clock to pop that pussy in a handstand on stage for the rest of her Friday and Saturday nights. And then all the while, super highly addicted to crystal meth. Girl, it was a lot.”

This information is all relayed to me with Katya’s rapid, machine-gun-fire wit, and as a result it takes a moment for me to realize the gravity of what she’s really saying. Crystal meth addiction is not a joke, which is precisely why Katya has made it into one. This, ultimately, is Katya’s genius: her comedy is a reminder that if we can find the humor in life’s darkest moments, there is hope for our survival.