My favorite journalist is a shrieking British Columbian who dresses like an exploded 1970s Soviet golf catalog. He was born John Ruskin, but changed his name to Nardwuar the Human Serviette. (“Serviette” is Canadian for napkin.) He hosts a weekly radio show on CiTR Vancouver, 101.9 FM, but his best work is done on camera, in chaotic interviews with musicians that he posts on YouTube.

The first Nardwuar videos I saw were on a VHS tape owned by a Canadian musician I lived with in the mid-’90s. (Before there was YouTube, Nardwuar did the interviews for a Canadian network called MuchMusic.) I couldn’t believe what he was showing me: an obnoxious young man accosting musicians I held in high regard, who was only rarely physically assaulted for his impertinence. I thought it was all an act, the sort of high-wire disingenuousness that would later be perfected by Sacha Baron Cohen. This was the slacker era, when enthusiasm was a debased currency. We were all cowards back then.

Even today, enthusiasm can be alienating to those who don’t appreciate its object. (This is how I feel about all sports.) A Nardwuar interview is like an explosion; you begin outside its blast radius, until “the Nard” subsumes both you and the subject into the smoking crater of sincerity at its core. It’s a strange service journalism of the spirit — a performative reminder that loving something should be exciting, that the enthusiast’s risk of looking like a dork is trumped by the pleasures of connection.

Nardwuar appears to his interviewees as a socially toxic superfan, the kind of person most entertainers have learned to handle with kid gloves stuck to the end of a 10-foot pole. He speaks with a pronounced Canadian accent, piped through vocal cords that seem to have been replaced with megaphones. His sense of personal space suggests he grew up in an overcrowded box: A Nardwuar interview doubles as an extended game of chicken between his clunky microphone and his interviewee’s teeth. (The New Orleans rapper Currensy started his third interview with Nardwuar worrying that he would get “bashed in the lip.”)