Conner O’Malley’s Intensely Funny, Deeply Stupid Manosphere

Everyone has something that would make them snap. Losing a job perhaps. The death of a loved one. For Conner O’Malley’s character in one of the funniest sketches on the series “I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson,” it’s a bumper sticker that reads, “Honk if you’re horny.”

He is, so he does. Then in a virtuosic display of mania, he groans, jumps out of his car, randomly spins in a circle and acts aggrieved beyond reason. Why, he needs to know from the owner of the sticker, is there no relief? Bending over in full-body agony, O’Malley assumes that the sign was posted by someone who “helps guys so horny that their stomach hurts.” Then he leaps in the air pointing at himself, howling unnecessarily but also poignantly: “’Cause that’s what I am!”

This is deeply stupid, of course. But also, it’s somehow intensely funny in a way that no one could write. O’Malley, a loose-limbed performer with a wide grin, specializes in brittle men. Not since Sam Kinison has a comedian done more with a scream. Hollow and desperate, self-evidently silly, his yell announces the idiocy of the id. But unlike most comic roars, it inspires some compassion.

O’Malley is a cult hero in the comedy world, in part due to his gift for becoming unglued. Playing Chris Elliott-like lunatics, he raged at Seth Meyers on “Late Night,” he was a young version of Louis C.K. on “Louie” and he riffed off Aidy Bryant, now his wife, on “Broad City.” He wrote for “How To With John Wilson” and provided loud contrast to the serenely sensible star of “Joe Pera Talks With You.”

An O’Malley cameo is a seal of approval to comedy nerds. But for the full experience, follow him on YouTube, where he keeps up a furiously productive artistic pace, creating an entire oeuvre of spoofs of conspiratorial, overly online, primally yelping men: utopian tech bros, finance gurus, conspiracy nuts, dudes just hanging out.