We recently paid a studio visit at an undisclosed location in Brooklyn to meet the mysterious street artist with a sense of humor Hanksy, whose popularity has steadily risen since his first wheatpaste in NoLIta only two years ago. Since then, Hanksy’s become a bit of a divisive figure in the street art world, due in part to his humorously punny and deliberately non-political Banksy/Tom Hanks parodies. But maybe it’s because his style is more Internet than street: “My level of humor is on-par with the majority of the Internet... And the Internet took it and ran with it,” says Hanksy. “I was like, shit, I better take it and run with it, too.”

Our NYC correspondent Pete Pabon interviewed the law-school-dropout-turned-artist, and in the video below, we get an in-depth retelling of some of the backstories behind the king of the pun kingdom‘s steady rise to notoriety.