The comedian Tim Robinson seems to love playing obsessive weirdos. His Emmy-winning sketch series I Think You Should Leave is packed with them: a dating-show contestant who can’t stop using a zip line; an office drone attempting to beat a nonsensical computer game; a rideshare driver who has taped-up window decals and wants—no, needs—people to call him “the driving crooner.” In the film Friendship, Robinson played a man so crushed after being rejected by a new friend group that he later holds the men who rebuffed him at gunpoint.

As a result, Robinson’s work can be intense and disturbing to watch. His characters are often beyond belligerent, and the cinematography can resemble horror films or true-crime dramas. Still, he’s cultivated a dedicated following, as evidenced by his apparent box-office pull and by the proliferation of Robinson-related memes over the years: Even those who haven’t seen a minute of his work have probably become familiar with his face via images of him, say, dressed as a hot dog or furiously pointing at the camera. His latest show, HBO’s The Chair Company, is the clearest distillation yet of what makes Robinson so compelling as a performer. The episodic series, which he co-created with his collaborator Zach Kanin, offers an intimate look at a certain type of socially challenged man: someone who believes himself to be macho, while also yearning to be accepted as a regular guy. In the process, Robinson taps into a persona audiences can laugh at—and maybe even recognize—but find sympathetic anyway.

Robinson plays the bespectacled everyman Ron, who unravels when his chair collapses moments after he delivers a rousing speech at work. Embarrassed over having his time in the spotlight thwarted by a piece of furniture, Ron seeks out the manufacturer. The quest leads him down rabbit holes that threaten to upend his otherwise average existence, while exposing parts of Ron’s psyche he perhaps never understood. He’s a more intimately observed version of the disgruntled-but-desperate man Robinson has often played in his sketch comedy—and that many comedians have embodied in recent years as well. Some of today’s most popular comics have built their personal brands on the kind of aggressive behavior Ron exhibits. But Robinson maintains a line between who he is and who he plays on-screen; in this way, he's more akin to the comedian Nathan Fielder, who similarly uses long-form fiction to explore the wannabe-alpha-male archetype. That helps him frame Ron’s journey as a story about more than just an average man’s fragile ego. His descent into conspiracism-driven madness illuminates both the ridiculousness and pain of trying to be liked.

The pressure to keep up appearances amid the wackiness of daily life gets enhanced by the show’s offbeat dialogue, a tool Robinson has relied on throughout his career; some of his most popular sketches come peppered with technically incorrect English in grammatically loopy lines such as “Triples is best” and “For 50 seconds, I thought there was monsters on the world.” This type of bizarre wording is inherently quotable, but in The Chair Company, such Robinson-isms also help underline the strangeness of casual communication. In one of my favorite exchanges, Ron tells another man to “have a nice day.” That’s a perfectly routine sign-off, but the man, who had approached Ron by mistake, becomes despondent. “How?!” he replies. Ron doesn’t answer; engaging with such an abstract question would mean becoming the last thing he wants to be seen as: weird.

That desire to seem normal may be what makes Robinson’s characters irresistible. In his sketches, even the most oddball figures—a focus-group participant with terrible ideas, a man struggling to back out of a parking lot—are self-conscious about their unpopularity. Throughout The Chair Company, Ron’s need for approval yields something of an identity crisis. He’s hyperaware that his investigation into the titular furniture enterprise is unusual, yet he can’t deny that his double life as a suburban vigilante who’s actually uncovering the existence of a shadowy corporation makes him feel powerful. But his life gets a lot harder with his secret in tow. Fitting in, the show suggests, means fighting in an eternal battle against your own impulses. Ron’s efforts to juggle his dogged, sometimes cringeworthy pursuit for justice with his responsibilities to his family are admirable—maybe even inspiring. Not all of us would risk so much humiliation just to fix a faulty chair design.

Besides, Ron doesn’t seem to be entirely delusional. The show has planted plenty of clues that Ron has indeed stumbled upon a conspiracy of some sort; he’s just ill-equipped to fully understand what it is, or what it means. And if anything, he’s not alone in feeling like the odd man out. The series’s running gags involve other characters’ off-kilter fixations, such as an accomplice of Ron indulging in X-rated comfort watches, or Ron’s work rival insisting on throwing a party with an overly complicated theme. Everyone, it seems, is obsessed with something. Maybe that’s what makes us human.