Why do I love Jane Wickline? Why might you? I won't say "should" because comedy is funny that way. (Ha ha.) Humor resonates with something individual, possibly innate and probably inexplicable inside each of us; our sense of it is something we can't control. "Helpless laughter," that's a phrase.

I know from online testimonials that I'm not the only person who loves Wickline, just as I know that there are those who do not like her at all (to put it mildly), who believe she has no place on "Saturday Night Live," where she's finishing her second season as a featured player, or in any public space whatsoever. I can do nothing for such people, beyond expressing my condolences; they are missing something special. (There are also the inbetweeners — haters edging toward acceptance.)

And, of course, it's more than possible that you have no idea who I'm talking about. So let's talk about Jane.

There is the "Saturday Night Live" Jane, best known for the songs she urgently performs during "Weekend Update," but there is also TikTok Jane, who began making one-woman multiple-character sketches in 2020, and Dukes, her ongoing live double act with Liva Pierce. Even before "SNL," where she has appeared in some 100 sketches, albeit often with only a line or two, she had amassed a considerable body of work; you can find multiple fan-made supercuts of her homemade videos, running as long as four hours. I came in late to this party, working backward from "SNL," but, like the singer of Wickline's "Party," who refuses to depart even after the hosts have gone to bed, gotten up and gone to work, I have no plans to leave. I like the free-associative nature of her humor, the droll precision of her speech, and the fact that, while I know she will zig and zag, I never know which way she'll turn.

As regularly as "SNL" has been declared dead over the years, it continues to generate passionate responses, and every new player arrives with a target painted on their back. And Wickline is hard to miss; she's only the third member of a small club, alongside Leslie Jones and Ellen Cleghorne, of the show's 6-foot women. But she seems to have wandered in from some other aesthetic universe; the very qualities that lead some to say she doesn't fit in are those that make her feel fresh to me. More so than many cast members, who wear their pedigrees on their sleeve, she generates a feeling of "Well, well, what do we have here?" with no easy, immediate answer. The fact that she's so polarizing is, in its way, a recommendation. She's different. She's a mystery.

Here is what I know about her, factually. She'll turn 27 in July. She went to Santa Monica High and graduated with a degree in creative writing from Oberlin College, where she performed sketch comedy and edited the campus humor magazine. She worked as a copy editor in Philadelphia. She was part of "Stapleview," a TikTok-based sketch show. Along with her demonstrated keyboard skills, she plays solid jazz trumpet. Haters point out that long before Wickline was born, her mother worked as an assistant to Lorne Michaels, as if that is the only possible reason she's on his show, and that her father, Matt, wrote for "Late Night with David Letterman" and "In Living Color," as if that must have had something to do with it as well. Besides the fact that the notion of "nepo babies" is tedious in itself, it's hard to imagine Michaels casting anyone as a favor. And I reject the idea that she's untalented as a writer or an actor, though the formality of her speech and language, which strikes me as oddly poetic, does clearly read to some as stiff or awkward.

Though I've seen one brief example of Wickline onstage doing stand-up, in some seemingly earlier time, she's constitutionally a sketch comic, even when she's the only member of the troupe. Her comedy is dialectical, it rides on characters talking at cross purposes, inhabiting separate clashing realities. Even on "Weekend Update," playing her songs in what are nominally solo spots, she caroms off anchors Colin Jost or Michael Che, who comment, interrupt and regard her with bemusement.

In nearly all her TikTok skits, Wickline plays all the parts, cutting back and forth, sometimes distinguishing the characters only by the tops they wear, the camera angle and the background, which might be inexpertly flown in, cutting off part of her body. (I prefer to consider this an aesthetic choice, rather than merely an easy or affordable one; they do get a little less lo-fi over time.) Her delivery can vary little from character to character — she assumes attitudes, but doesn't put on voices — which forces you to pay attention, especially because the dialogue and editing can move fast. But there is always enough in the writing, and the acting, to keep things straight.

Among the many situations she presented:

An astronaut who lands on the moon to find two women arguing about a sandwich. A plant sitter who eats her clients' plants while insisting she's very good at her job. A ghost stuck forever in the Halloween costume she wore — a ketchup bottle — on the night she died. A woman dining in the Space Needle restaurant finding that she is eating in a non-rotating "second location" at the bottom of a building attached to a Target. (Woman to waitress: "Can you look me in the face and tell me this place is spinning?" Waitress: "The theme of this place is 'spinning restaurant.'" Woman: "That was not my question.") A high school student invited to join a NASA program on the basis of a science fair project. ("My baking soda volcano?" "If that's your name for it, then yes.") A batter who doesn't understand that no one on the field is on her team. ("It's me against all of you?")

Sometimes there will be a sort of punchline. ("I should have told her about our cult. I'm such a space cadet in the morning.") Some skits end so abruptly you wonder if there isn't a longer version you're not smart or cool or young enough to find.

In one particularly twisty example, Jane 1 (we'll call her) sits on an egg, breaking it. "I see you found the first egg," says Jane 2, who declares, "You're about to face the most challenging Easter egg hunt ever." This somehow swerves through Hamlet to Jesus meeting "a kindly warthog — who taught him that growing up is all about accessing one's innate sexuality" to "Peanuts" ("And now you see, that's what Easter is all about, Charlie Brown") to Jane 1 asking, "You want to play Connect Four?" "You know me so well," Jane 2, replies tenderly. "This was always about Connect Four."

On "Saturday Night Live," Wickline is used more and less well (though never ill). Her performance in "Winter Olympics Promo," in which she played a reluctant luger ("I hate luge. It's way too fast. It scares me to death and I seriously hate it"), finally sent screaming downhill, is what turned me into a fan.

Wickline certainly doesn't need me to defend her. She may not be a typical cast member — she doesn't do impersonations, for one thing, and I can't imagine her in the sort of "SNL" film comedy players have regularly graduated to, though David Lynch might have had a part for her, or Wes Anderson. But she's doing fine in the sketches, making her little impressions, whether as a podcasting 12-year-old boy or a clapper loader on a Norwegian film set or leading a romantic production number about a tiny baby shoe.

It's during "Weekend Update" that the spotlight shines on her playing a few bewigged characters. With Marcello Hernández, she's half of "The Couple You Can't Believe Are Together," Alyssa to his Grant. (She's "a student at Barnard getting her master's in 18th century graveyards"; he teaches "a SoulCycle class on the tarmac at LaGuardia, baby.") In a long blond wig and glasses, she was a "Gen Z sexpert" who might have had sex, or just done a somersault. As Tamara, "pronounced Tamara," she presented her New Year's resolution to get "365 buttons, one for each day. I want to do more fun stuff, and I'm getting scared of time passing and I want to be more conscious of it." (Che: "That's a nice idea. So what's your plan for the buttons?" "My plan is one button each day.")

But it's in her songs, which have a habit of turning dark, that we get the full Wickline. One conflates "the child actors from 'Stranger Things,'" with AI as "the greatest threat to humanity right now." ("We must kill them while they're still weak, the child actors from 'Stranger Things' / What if they become self-aware? We need to keep them occupied.") Another, beginning as an apology for chronic lateness, becomes an uncharacteristically aggressive defense of it. ("No one needs to know if I'm on my way. Calm the eff down and focus on you … I'm gonna show up 40 minutes late with an ice cream cone.") A love song, "I Choose You," turns into the trolley problem.

When she comes on to play, toting her digital keyboard, it's always as herself, or mostly herself, with her name spelled out across the screen: Jane Wickline.

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(Robert Lloyd has been a Los Angeles Times television critic since 2003.)

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