If you find yourself at a dive-y karaoke bar in the West Village with Kyle Mooney, as I did a few years ago, you may wonder if the comedian moonlights as the lead singer of a band in his rare, spare time. His karaoke style is aggressively enthusiastic and it’s not uncommon for a performance to end with a shirtless finale. The sight is both inspiring and intimidating—the sort of high level karaoke that makes you want to attempt all verses of “No Diggity”, or adjust the lighting for a “Bohemian Rhapsody” performance. Mooney, man, he contains multitudes.

Mooney’s work now could be described as unusual for SNL (more on that in a bit), but his path to the show has been fairly straightforward. While at USC, Mooney, now 32, joined a sketch group where he met Beck Bennett. The two formed, alongside Nick Rutherford and filmmaker Dave McCary, the comedy troupe Good Neighbor which gained online fame thanks to off-beat YouTube videos that have been viewed millions of times by avid fans of their signature weirdness. The spots are pretty lo-fi—akin to grainy home videos, internet vlogs or on-the-street interviews—the video equivalent of a 90’s era, loose-fitting, neon patterned top, but that’s absolutely part of their appeal. It’s a simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable viewing experience. The characters are real enough that they could be your friends from high school, but the execution is just nuts enough to be comedy.

Four years into Mooney’s and Beck’s stint at SNL (they were hired the same year), Mooney has established a clear and distinctly strange voice within the late-night institution. While his character Bruce Chandling, the Laugh Castle veteran stand-up comic, is his most well-known recurring character, and he’s done impressions of everyone from Chuck Norris to David Axelrod, the work that receives the most attention is often not even aired. SNL has a simultaneously insulting and flattering section on YouTube dedicated to sketches that were “Cut for Time” and it is well-populated by Mooney’s curly bob. A 2015 video, for example, of a rain-soaked Mooney conducting on the street interviews with Justin Bieber fans waiting outside 30 Rock for his Today Show performance has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times and is the basis for a Mooney tribute-think-piece on Slate.

Now, as he enters the tail end of his fourth season on the show and prepares for the future release of a passion-project feature film, the quiet comedic voice of Kyle Mooney seems to be getting louder, and the fans—online and off—are listening. Below, I spoke to him about his collection of VHS tapes, what he looks for when he goes to thrift shops, and how Alec Baldwin signs a copy of Beetlejuice.

GQ Style: Within your own personal wardrobe do you have any prized pieces? T-shirts? Sneakers? It doesn’t have to be a suit or an ascot.

Kyle Mooney: Well, it’s not an ascot. A lot of the clothes I still wear were purchased at the Goodwill near USC circa 2006/2007. I've always been kind of deep into thrifting and secondhand clothing. I feel like I've got a pretty, relatively, extensive Christmas sweatshirt collection. I'm pretty deep into 80s nostalgia, specifically Children's entertainment, so a lot of California Raisins, Garfield, Alf, that's kind of a lot of the clothes I have and cherish the most.

With thrifting, with that hunt, when you find something that you never expected I find you remember it more or give it more value. Do you have those pieces that were the diamonds in the rough?

This is this Alf sweatshirt I have, it’s a light blue with a little Alf figure on it, but its three-dimensional, so there's fur which is puffy, and the eyeball is like a darkened pearl. I wear it maybe once a year if not once every two years, for one because I'm just so fearful that the eyeball is gonna fall off but two, it’s just such a loud statement to walk around in. Without sounding too egocentric, I feel like anytime I wear it people do love it.