Listen to support it, WNYC Studios.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of W NYC Studios and the New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

It is a very rough time to be in school. As a teacher or as a student,

you're in the crossfire of the culture wars with book bands, the movement for

parental rights, and much more.

There's the fight over cell phones, with half the states now restricting them,

and budgets, of course, are always being slashed.

Somehow all of that chaos makes schools fertile ground for comedy.

There's Abbott Elementary, which is won a handful of Emmy Awards,

and debuting this season is English teacher. It stars Brian Jordan Alvarez who created the show for FX.

Alvarez has been an actor for many years, but he quite suddenly burst into fame on Tik-Tok. A year ago he posted a video that exploded. Everybody was suddenly talking about Brian Jordan Alvarez, including our staff writer, Vincent Cunningham.

Like perhaps many listeners first heard

O'Brien Jordan Alvarez on Tik-Tok, where he plays a panoply of characters and one of them perhaps most famously is named

TJ Mac a man who loves to get deals at such places as TJ Max and he sings a song that goes like,

sitting, sitting is the opposite of standing.

Serum is the opposite of standing.

Serum is the opposite of standing.

Serin is the the opposite running around

and sitting is a wonderful thing to do because you see I don't know it's a song about

sitting it's a song about the benefits of sitting as opposed to say standing

...