Trixie Mattel's hair is a satin-sheen platinum candy mountain. Her shank-sharp cheek contours slice her face in two, tapering, at the brink of her lips, into the dusky rose peaks of twin mountains. Pristine eyebrows arch up nearly to her hairline, mountains threatening to bump into the clouds. Her breasts are like two...mountains. Trixie's clothes are pink, sometimes off-pink, but never black or even navy. Her eyes are not blue because, she says, blue eyes do not "go with every type of look." (Take that, Aryan Nations.) Her figure is an ultra-curvy hourglass that measures time in the passage of finely milled glitter. Her nails are mountains—I'm kidding! They are dainty claws. Trixie's style is Barbie, but with extremely unrealistic beauty standards. Her fabrics are frothy. Her gray baseball cap has a Coors Light logo on it—wait, that's a gentleman's baseball cap. Right now Trixie Mattel is a gentleman.

Brian Firkus—Trixie Mattel during his working hours—has met me in a borderline-too-French French restaurant in Brooklyn to elucidate the logistics of life as a workaday celebrity drag queen in 2017. Despite the stifling political climate, we are living in a Jazz Age of drag, and Firkus's sudden success is a product of the boom: In the span of two years, he has gone from lip-synching for tips in Midwestern gay bars to co-hosting, in drag, a national TV show that airs its third episode on Viceland tonight. To put that career leap in perspective, it's akin to you doing whatever it is you do and then, two years from now, co-hosting a national TV show that airs its third episode on Viceland tonight.

As an entertainer on The Trixie & Katya Show, Trixie Mattel is the human equivalent of a glaring neon sign advertising a sale on hot dogs in hell, but in person Firkus is a quiet, quick thinker. The first thing he does upon sitting down is politely pose a series of technical questions about the microphone properties of the digital recorder I have brought—questions I am unable to answer but that, it turns out, he is. In a voice that would not wake a newborn, he offers an overview of the various shapes of standard mic-pickup patterns. When I ask him how he knows so much about the mechanics of personal audio devices, he seems bashful, or perhaps just confused by what he considers an obvious answer. He blinks at me, wide-eyed. "Just from sound and life," he says after a moment. Then he adds, "I learned a lot about microphones when I started traveling because I had to learn how to microphone my tap shoes."

Firkus and his co-host, Brian McCook, met under their other identities (he, Trixie Mattel; McCook as Katya Zamolodchikova) while competing against each other on the seventh season of the drag queen reality competition RuPaul's Drag Race. Both were fan favorites—Katya for her outré humor and cut-glass bone structure; Trixie for her wildly cartoonish appearance and eczema-dry wit. ("Trixie looks like—" McCook begins excitedly to tell me by phone later, then stops short. "—I don't even really know; I've lost connection with reality so much being in the drag world that I don't even know what she looks like to a regular human being. She's crazy!") Katya lost the competition. Trixie lost the competition even more because she, in the madcap, borderline incomprehensible spirit of RuPaul's Drag Race, was eliminated twice. But do not weep at this record of public failure on film: In losing, Trixie and Katya engineered a golden future for themselves, and a platinum slate of entertainment programming for the American public. First step: Film themselves talking to each other and put the footage on YouTube. Next step: Not needed, because what they achieved with the first step was so perfectly, eye-wateringly, tongue-swallowingly funny it could not be improved upon. Who would have predicted the spiritual successor to Wayne's World would be hosted in negative space by two alarming divas named Brian?

"I don’t dress up as a woman, I dress up as a caricature of a caricature of a woman."

"It was a way for us both to do some reparative work," says Firkus of pretty much the funniest thing I've ever seen in my entire life, which is UNHhhh, the YouTube series he and McCook began as Trixie and Katya following their eliminations from Drag Race. Since the spring of 2016, the duo have cranked out 68 digital episodes of UNHhhh. The enterprise was so successful that Viceland stepped in to turn the series into a bona fide TV program.