Fred Armisen is a bit of a polarizing figure on Saturday Night Live; his impression of President Obama is often derided as flavorless and dull, while his bumbling take on former New York Governor Paterson, a blind man, was criticized as tasteless. In sketches, his recurring characters, including the hapless pontificator Nicholas Fehn and oblivious TV producer Roger Brush, can be seen as one-note, repetitive, and grating ... and his Garth character, who extemporizes painfully bad songs with Kristen Wiig on Weekend Update, has anecdotally inspired homicidal rage.

I think Armisen is the most talented cast member on SNL, and possibly the most versatile and promethean since the late Phil Hartman. The problem is with the sensibility and format of SNL itself, which favors broad, easily telegraphed comic ideas and aggressive personas. Armisen’s work is far subtler than, say, the hilarious Will Ferrell’s incarnations of raging inarticulate manchildren; a Roger Brush sketch may not (and usually does not) evoke a single belly laugh from the audience, but the Brush character is so well observed, so precisely delineated, that, even in the absence of any hard jokes or bombastic physical business, I am giggling helplessly by the end of the piece because I KNOW THAT GUY.

I used to imagine Armisen faring better on SCTV, the peerless character-driven sketch show set in the fictional third-rate Canadian city Mellonville, populated by vivid and eccentric characters who nonetheless felt wholly familiar and multi-dimensional; the show suggested that these maniacs had lives that continued after the sketches ended. They were not punchline machines or catch-phrase generators but fully realized and lovingly rendered types—small business owners, local news readers, municipal politicians—who became funnier the more often they appeared instead of shrilly wearing-out their welcome, as is often the case on SNL.

Armisen has found his ideal format in Portlandia, a sketch series cocreated and costarring musician Carrie Brownstein, which returns for a new season on IFC this week. The program’s version of Portland (a smug, humorless bastion of leftist ideology and “organic” obsessed neo-hippies) has the same lived-in, multi-dimensional quality as SCTV’s Melonville. The sketches are mostly loose and loopy, unafraid to veer into absurdism or meander in off-kilter directions. Armisen’s performance style is ideal here, and he has perfected a comic type I’m not sure I’ve seen before on screen but have encountered so often in real life: the toxic Beta Male. He is soft, coddled, desperate to be seen as kind and sensitive and politically correct ... but filled with contempt, grotesquely entitled, and as blinkered and narcissistic as any Wall Street Master of the Universe. It’s a cutting portrayal of an infuriating type, and Armisen masterfully captures it with the smallest of gestures; a supplicating head tilt masking monstrous selfishness and self-regard. 

So this Saturday I’ll likely chuckle at Armisen on Saturday Night Live, but I’m more excited to see him Friday on Portlandia.  If I’m really lucky, he might put a bird on it.

All of my fellow Portlandia fans are cordially invited to attend a special event here at the Paley Center in NYC on January 21st with Fred and Carrie celebrating the new season. Tell the mayor!