It’s been more than 24 hours since the west coast premiere of Portlandia, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s PDX-centric sketch comedy show, and, like all Portlanders, I am compelled (required?) to voice my opinion on it.

In short, I loved it. I’m a big fan of Christopher Guest’s scary-accurate satires like Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show, and—in its best moments, at least—that’s what Portlandia felt like. And, like Guest’s films, the best jokes in Portlandia are the ones that only someone familiar with the subculture being parodied are likely to appreciate. Take the joke about the puzzle store (transcribed from memory):

[Scene: A feminist bookstore. A man is being berated for using the restroom without being a paying customer. He picks a random book off the shelf.]

Man: Fine. Here, I’ll buy this.

Worker: That’s part of a series. There are 16 books, you have to subscribe to all of them.

Man: I just want to buy this one.

Worker: It’s part of a series! You wouldn’t go into a puzzle store and just buy one piece, would you?

Man: Where is there a puzzle store?

Worker: There’s one on Hawthorne and another one on Southwest Broadway.

If you know Portland, that joke is amazing, because it’s entirely plausible that there could be two separate stores in Portland that only sell puzzles, and if there were such stores, those are exactly the streets they would be on. If you don’t know Portland… well, I’m not sure that joke would land at all. Similarly, the sketch about the obsessive locovores who refuse to order the chicken until they’ve visited the farm where “Colin” was raised, is probably a hell of a lot funnier if you actually know—or are—someone like that.

The opening musical number (“The Dream of the 90s is Alive in Portland”) was brilliant, and perfectly expressed the show’s thesis: the things that make Portland great are the same things that make it kind of ridiculous. Those who contend that the show’s humor is mean-spirited, anti-youth, get-off-my-lawn-ism baffle me. Portlandia is a love letter to a great city whose only flaw is that its people tend to take themselves and their pursuits—noble as they may be—a bit too seriously. Anyone objecting too strenuously is just proving their point.