It’s only been a couple of weeks, but I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson has already staked a claim as one of Netflix’s most original and well-received gambits. The six-part sketch series features some of the boldest and most creative comedy we’ve seen in years, thanks to the sensibilities of creator/star Robinson himself, as well as co-writers Zach Kanin and John Solomon, not to mention the guys behind The Lonely Island, who produced this beautiful monstrosity.

Each sketch in I Think You Should Leave adheres to its own batshit logic, sometimes twisting conceits and changing directions completely out of left field to occasionally deliver scenes that feel less like comedy bits, and more like warped, relentless Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf scenarios. In the first episode, the televised finals of the “Baby of the Year” competition devolve into bloodthirsty chaos. In another, an aged-up Will Forte attempts to get revenge on the baby who kept him awake on a seven-hour transatlantic flight thirty years ago… by tracking down the man the baby became and crying nonstop on his flight.

GQ sat down with Robinson to discuss the sudden unexpected cultural phenomenon of I Think You Should Leave. Often the manic driving force of his sketches, the 37-year-old in person is a quiet, gentle speaker who is just as amused by and invested in the stories the show tells as his fans are. Over the course of an hour, we explored the psychology behind avoiding embarrassment at all costs (even if it means embarrassing yourself further), his too-short stint on SNL, and the many subtle narrative turns of a seven-minute sketch entitled “Honk If You’re Horny,” which ends with an original song performed by Robinson at his mother’s funeral. It’s a whole thing.

GQ: I think I devoured the entire thing in maybe a day. The episodes are just short enough that you can almost watch it like a movie if you want to.

Tim Robinson: Right, right. When you start putting sketches back to back some of it can feel exhausting, so we decided to just keep cutting them down. Then when we got to that length, everything flowed way better.

Netflix can be a double-edged sword. You have a lot of creative control, but you're also competing for attention from people who are just gonna load up season 3 of The Office for the 14th time. How do you make sure that it's gonna get seen?

Akiva [Schaffer], from Lonely Island, who produced and directed it, he's really good at that, so he talked to them. Coming from Comedy Central, where my last show was, was a world of difference because it's streaming as opposed to cable which people are moving away from.

Right, you don't have to build in ad breaks or anything like that. In a lot of reviews for this show, one of the things that kept coming up is its constant examining of awkward social situations. Was there an overarching philosophy going into this show, or was it really just what makes you laugh, and sometimes it really is just someone at a party being awful?

The latter. Zach [Kanin] and I just found ourselves writing a lot of scenes like that, where the person is refusing to admit they've done something wrong, or lying, and will do anything to cover that up. So it became the theme of the whole show because we kept gravitating towards writing those scenes.