The Finale of "The Rehearsal" Is Outlandish and Sublime

Nathan Fielder, like Andy Kaufman before him, makes performance-art comedy that does not only poke fun at the world but experimentally perturbs it, and he plies this trade in the buffer zone between reality and artifice. He presents himself as something of a Kaspar Hauser figure for the age of artificial intelligence, a foundling raised not by wolves but by an advanced and affectless race of extraterrestrial anthropologists. His object is to isolate and mimic the rudiments of human sociability. Fielder's intuition is that many putatively normal people share his own bewildered dread of everyday interactions, which are at once governed by established, if opaque, social norms and subject to unnerving unpredictability. Children learn to tame uncertainty through repetition: they replay interactions in an effort to interpret and control the varied challenges of their environment.