I Think You Should Leave: is this the funniest Netflix show yet?

Here’s a disturbing confession: I gave up on Netflix’s new sketch show I Think You Should Leave after a single sketch. It started with a premise (man tries to pull open a push door in front of someone whose approval he craves) and then ended up with a conclusion you could see coming from the second he grabbed the handle (man pulls door off hinges to save face). And that was enough for me. Because, quite clearly, I am an idiot.

It took me almost two weeks to return to the show, and the shame I felt was immediate. Because sketch two was much more indicative of I Think You Should Leave. A compensation lawyer fronts a commercial in which he presents an increasingly specific scenario: you bought a house that didn’t declare a termite infestation, so you independently called some exterminators, but when they came to your house they spent too long in your bathroom, then they shouted “It’s turbo time!” and chastised you for not being part of the turbo team, then they secretly swapped your toilet for an identical toilet with a hole only small enough for farts so now you can’t flush any of your dumps.

From that point in, I wolfed down the entire series of I Think You Should Leave in one sitting, genuinely incapacitated with laughter. And then I watched it all again. And again. I’m at the stage where I’m cherrypicking sketches now, but I’ve seen my favourites six or seven times now. I’ve watched I Think You Should Leave more times than I’ve watched entire series of Monty Python, and it’s only been available for two and a half weeks. I’m fully obsessed at this point. At its peak, I think I Think You Should Leave might be one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

Starring and co-created by Tim Robinson, one of the only Saturday Night Live cast members ever to be officially demoted to writer mid-run, I Think You Should Leave is the model of brevity. There are six episodes, and the longest runs to just 18 minutes. Episodes aren’t ordered by theme, but some of Robinson’s apparent obsessions – mudpies and skeletons in particular – manage to cluster together from time to time. Its calibre of guest star, who number Sam Richardson, Will Forte, Andy Samberg, Cecily Strong and Fred Willard, is exceptionally strong.

And then there are the sketches, which are all impossible to pin down. A sketch about a baby contest turns violent, then sexual, then morbid, then violent again. A focus group for cars quickly becomes a star-making vehicle for an octogenarian Gif-machine called Ruben Rabasa. A Walk the Line spoof, of all things, gets hijacked by a song so magnificent that it stopped me breathing for 90 seconds. Almost without fail, the sketches escalate quickly, jump the tracks and end up in genuinely baffling places. The first time you watch I Think You Should Leave, it will feel like an assault. You’ll be delighted and disoriented in equal measure. And then it will end, and you’ll feel empty, and you’ll start all over again.

The series isn’t entirely without precedent. There sketches have a loosey-goosey commitment that lingers from Robinson’s old series Detroiters. The Lonely Island, who produced the show, lend some of their scattershot charm. It sometimes borrows from Tim and Eric’s disconnected absurdism, and in terms of punchlines it often feels like a cousin of the Comedy Bang Bang show. And you sometimes get the feeling that it doesn’t outstay its welcome for a reason; this is a loud television programme where everyone appears to scream by default, and a little of that tends to go an awfully long way.

And yet taken as a whole, I Think You Should Leave deserves to be held up as one of the finest things that Netflix has ever produced. It is single-handedly going to revive sketch comedy from the wet, wet mud. If you like it, I automatically know that we can be friends. That’s how good it is.

• I Think You Should Leave is available on Netflix now