"I know what I'm about son."

Ron Swanson is the simply the best Swanson.

I watch all kinds of comedy and I love all kinds of comedy. Good comedians are great philosophers who bring out the absurdities in life. They’re great observers, great listeners, great communicators, great actors, and great thinkers.

Good comedians extract humor out of the simplest of things. Ron Swanson finds it in silence. While many comedians are loud, energetic, emphatic, expressive and do great caricature, Ron manages to be funny by not doing anything, a master of deadpan comedy, he’s the punctuation marks in the otherwise unpunctuated soliloquies of Leslie Knopes.

A libertarian, a man of the earth who likes woodwork and leather, who hates the government yet works for it, stocky, flaunting a thick mustache that completely covers his upper lip, whiskey drinker, impossibly confident and nigh invulnerable, reserved about his feelings. There is hardly an unnecessary expression to be seen on that manly face. Swanson defines how to convey more by acting less, the Hemingway of acting. All you get from him, if you’re lucky, is a small up curving of the mustache, a slow sly closing of the eyelids, but mostly it’s terse sentences.

But he doesn’t just play a mean guy. Even for his superficial lack of emotion, Swanson manages to convey great depth of heart with his limited responses. It’s hard to not fall in love with the guy and his manly wisdom.

He’s also the best Ron.