Crowd-pleasing though those stunts may be, they’re not what makes Nathan for You one of the funniest shows on television (or, at any rate, one of the only shows that can make me laugh when nobody else is in the room). What makes the show work from episode to episode is something more thoughtful, and more elusive.

I’d describe it like this: Nathan for You is one of those small-business-fixer shows, like The Profit or Bar Rescue, but with an absurdist host who amplifies the amoral tendencies of American commercialism into the grotesque. He’ll push people to the bitter fringes of legality in pursuit of publicity and profit, as when he advised a liquor store to “sell liquor to minors,” burying the lede that the booze gets kept in storage until the customer turns 21. Then when the fallout comes, he’ll never admit to any wrongdoing. It was “legal,” so it was ethical enough.

Fielder’s character dares people to react by being such an uncomfortable host. It represents the morally upsetting side of modern business, the side cynical enough to fake a heartwarming viral video out of pure capitalist bravado, the side that entered the zeitgeist when social media became ubiquitous and turned everyone on the planet into a latent personal brand.

“The absurdity of personal branding and marketing nowadays is the thing that enabled me to sell these absurd ideas to business owners,” he says. “Because they’re not necessarily bad ideas, but there’s so much emphasis put on getting attention and branding, that some things that would get me laughed out of the room 20 years ago [have become] logical now. People understand, you see that conflict in people, where it doesn’t feel natural and it doesn’t feel right, instinctually, as a human. But they know intellectually that this is where society is at. And that conflict in people is really interesting.”

But that sounds one-note. Nine times out of ten, the premise of such a show would be nothing more than a sheltered comedian making callous fun of blue-collar businesses, and Nathan for You is definitely not that. It operates with empathy somehow. It’s hard to explain.

“That’s the problem with comedy sometimes,” says Fielder. “It’s just so execution-based, and when you describe the show to people, it’s easy to think of how that would be terrible. Fortunately, fans are very vocal. A lot of people tell me they force their friends to watch the show. I actually think that’s been our best marketing, is people being really into the show and just forcing people to watch.”

The unpredictability of real people also has something to do with its appeal.

“What we always hope for is that someone will take it in a direction that’s not expected at all, and then we can drop everything and go that way,” he says. “Those are usually the most engaging things that end up happening, when someone offers up something that we never expected.”

He cites, for example, a segment in which he advised a real estate agent to brand herself as the “Ghost Realtor,” who could both sense the presence of ghosts in a house and rid it of them if need be. Fielder saw a marketing opportunity in the half of the population who believe in the supernatural.

“You’d picture it playing like a lot of the segments do, where the person is a little skeptical maybe, and they want to do it because they think it’s a good idea or they want to be polite,” he says. “But this woman had actually had personal experiences with ghosts and actual violent experiences with ghosts that we did not know before I sat down with her. And because those things happened, they’re so authentic and real and so much more interesting than anything we would have planned.