We’ve just lived through what Vulture has labeled “Silly Song Summer,” during which onomatopoeias (Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam”), farcical film ballads (Barbie’s “I’m Just Ken,” The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s “Peaches”), and a Eurodance satire (Kyle Gordon a.k.a. D.J. Crazy Times’s “Planet of the Bass”) went viral. Novelty songs—fluky, hummable jokes—are nothing new, but TikTok has accelerated their production, and broadly, the cultural mood is trending toward cheesiness and wit.

The latest and greatest example is “Sitting,” by TJ Mack, an alter ego of the comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez. Be warned that you might not like or understand what this video is, but you won’t be able to get its melody out of your head or forget the natural law it reveals: “Sitting is the opposite of standing / Sitting is the opposite of running around.”

The words are sung in a pseudo–Robert Goulet bellow by some strange man whose face is mostly mouth and eyes. He elongates sitting into a rumble of joy; he adds an m sound to the end of standing; he rolls the r’s of running around. Over the course of the song, the cogency of the lyrics diminishes—sitting is “kinda like a nap / It’s kinda like something else”—but Mack’s enthusiasm, and the proximity of the camera to his giant teeth, doesn’t. We’ve all improvised this kind of nonsense to our pets, except now we, the viewers, are the pets.

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After Alvarez posted “Sitting” to his social-media accounts earlier this month, the internet stood in ovation. Remixers gave the song dance-pop and orchestral treatments. Cover artists rendered it as beautiful folk and cringey musical theater. Even radio stations have given “Sitting” a spin. “Tell me this is not that catchiest song you have ever heard,” one DJ said in her introduction.

[Read: Forget SNL. The best election satire is on TikTok.]

The phenomenon may seem like a random burble of the internet’s id, but Alvarez has been making similarly entrancing—if mostly nonmusical—work for the past few years. He’s an actor previously known for his role on the Will and Grace reboot and for his 2016 web series, The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo. (He was also in this year’s campy smash M3gan.) Pandemic isolation pushed him to try something new: taking selfie videos, and applying filters to his appearance and voice in order to invent a new cast of influencers.

The first such character, born in the early days of social distancing, was a meditation expert preaching about the “pure source energy” that can be tapped into by signing up for her class. Her name was Marnie T, and her chuckles and pauses and references to exotic travels approximated the actual tics of people who think they know the secrets of the universe. This was both funny and legitimately hypnotizing: Marnie locked her extraterrestrial gaze onto the camera with an intensity that all but forbade the viewer to scroll away.

Other surreal yet oddly recognizable characters entered the mix. They included a southern aunt who’s blasé about her fabulous wealth, a naive gay guy swept into a criminal conspiracy one day at brunch, an alien from a capitalist planet whose speeches combine Black Mirror and Office Space. Then there was TJ Mack, a happy-go-lucky TJ Maxx shopper who sings songs about whatever’s on his mind—laser tag, splashing, water, and now sitting. His wife, a woman of Grinch-y glamour, made her own videos, gloating about the high life afforded her by her husband’s music career.

Alvarez’s cinematic universe captures something modern: the weirdness of monologuing to an imagined online audience. But it’s also classic character work, part invention and part imitation. “I love people,” he told Vulture. “And I’m observant. I think … I sort of absorb someone’s energy, and I process it, even if it’s 20 years later.” Speaking with Them, Alvarez said he’d initially hoped to use his skills on Saturday Night Live or traditional sitcoms, but the internet showed him that he could do it on his own. “Imagine having a talent that you feel like nobody cares about,” he said, “and then suddenly you realize, ‘Oh my God, people do care about this. I was right. This is a cool thing to do.’”

Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are, indeed, eating traditional comedy’s lunch lately when it comes to funny characters. SNL and other late-night outlets have fitfully tried to evolve by hiring social-media-trained talents and targeting some sketches toward the terminally online crowd. But the best format with which to satirize our digitally mediated reality isn’t going to involve multiple cameras or a soundstage. It also isn’t going to be broadcast on TV networks that yearn to re-create the previous century’s monoculture. Our attention spans and tastes keep fracturing, and the ratings for late-night comedy keep declining.

Meanwhile, Alvarez’s characters are part of a growing pantheon of weirdos who live in our phones. Mass-niche audiences also tune in to Psyiconic’s Terri Joe, a demure Christian woman who savagely insults random people on livestreams, and Conner O’Malley, a machismo-poisoned prankster who once smoked 500 cigarettes for 5G. These comics riff on the absurd things the internet has done to our brains and our relationships with strangers. But they also celebrate timeless human tendencies, such as sitting.