The TV-show epigram offers a delicious sense of narrative infinity: think of “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them,” which closed every episode of the mid-century police drama “Naked City,” or “These are their stories,” the iconic kickoff to “Law & Order.” The exquisitely weird Canadian sitcom “Letterkenny” patches together those two pronouncements to craft its own self-perpetuating statement of purpose: “There are 5000 people in Letterkenny,” the screen reads at the start of each episode. “These are their problems.”

The series, whose first six seasons are available to American viewers on Hulu (a Hulu-exclusive seventh season was recently announced), follows the goings on of the titular town, a farming hamlet in rural Ontario. The plot, insofar as there is one, centers on the minor clashes among the locals’ assorted cliques. You’ve got the hicks, who tend their farms; the skids, who split their time between selling meth and break-dancing in the dollar-store parking lot; the jocks, who eat, sleep, and breathe hockey; and the natives, a First Nations crew who live just outside town on the reservation. Everyone is great-looking, has tons of free time, and is somewhere between twenty and thirty-five; they drink, fight, smoke, flirt, and occasionally screw. Mostly, they talk—in leaping, twisting, groaning, soaring volleys of puns and insults and wordplay that run so rapid-fire, and deliver such relentlessly satisfying comic payoff, that it’s hardly worth watching without the subtitles on.

“Letterkenny” began life on YouTube and made the jump to television in 2015, when it was picked up by the Canadian streaming service Crave. It almost instantaneously became a massive hit, though it’s been slow to catch on stateside—perhaps because of its verbal density (along with its prodigiously weird idiolect, there are also assorted heavy accents and plenty of Canada-specific references), or perhaps because it’s hard, given the glut of streamable TV, to sell viewers on a show about a bunch of country folks shooting the shit in deck chairs. I discovered the series by accident, while searching for something to fill the void left by “Schitt’s Creek,” the arch yet good-hearted Canadian sitcom about a rich family suddenly thrust into small-town life. “Letterkenny” is also arch, also shockingly good-hearted—and, like “Schitt’s Creek,” nonchalantly tolerant of its town’s diverse array of races, religions, and sexualities. “Letterkenny” is darker at heart, laced with more sex and drugs and physical violence than your standard half-hour comedy—but somehow it’s played lightly and balanced out by a profusion of surreal, almost over-the-top structural devices: strikingly symmetrical shots, characters whose faces are never seen, characters who undergo entire narrative arcs without ever appearing at all.

Our hero, among the five thousand residents of Letterkenny, is Wayne, a square-jawed, straight-spined, taciturn hunk who runs the family farm with his smokeshow sister Katy and two farmhand besties. Played with a locked jaw and terrible haircut by Jared Keeso, the show’s co-creator and writer, Wayne is king of the hicks, a courteous ladykiller in stonewashed jeans. He’s also the self-professed “toughest guy in Letterkenny,” a title he defends assiduously, in brawls that punctuate nearly every episode. Each smackdown follows the exact same choreography: once a challenger appears, Wayne pulls a swig of whiskey and hands off the bottle to a friend; he unbuttons his shirtsleeves, lights a cigarette, takes a puff, and flicks the rest away. The fights are always bloodless, always shot in slow motion. There are five thousand people in Letterkenny, but Wayne always wins.