OPINION: Move over Seinfeld, Fielder’s the funniest

The last words of Edmund Kean, in May 1833, are alleged to have been, “dying is easy, comedy is hard.” As if to prove the point, he died soon after without much difficulty. Unfortunately for Kean, there is nobody around today to verify his comic ability.

The very best comedians do not just make us laugh but find an almost unique way of doing so that feels largely without precedent. The likes of Andy Kaufman, Caroline Aherne, Mel Brooks, Elaine May and Rik Mayall are in this category, alongside television shows like Seinfeld, The Simpsons and Arrested Development. It is as though they all found entirely new ways of being funny.

The latest addition to the canon is Nathan Fielder, the Canadian behind Nathan for You, The Rehearsal and The Curse. He is working at a level so far above his small screen peers that it would be like comparing Lamine Yamal to a Maccabi League Footballer.

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Fielder’s first and funniest television programme, Nathan for You, set the template. Fielder played a version of himself in a docu-reality show that allowed struggling businesses to ask for help and utilise the expertise of a man who, the opening credits informed us, “graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades.”

The comedian’s persona, awkward and uncomfortable, is completely at odds with the kind of show he’s parodying. The blend of reality and fiction has more in common with a Charlie Kaufman script than Trigger Happy TV and, over four seasons, the show went far beyond its original premise and ended up occupying a position on the Venn diagram where comedy overlaps with performance art.

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The Rehearsal, which recently returned to our screens, seems to take a third season episode of Nathan for You as its starting point. In that remarkable 21 minutes of TV, entitled Smokers Allowed, Fielder was tasked with rescuing a struggling bar. He discovered that people would be allowed to smoke there so long as events were presented as a “play” for an audience of two.

He subsequently filmed a standard night at the establishment and hired actors to recreate the “events” verbatim. If there is a loophole, Fielder will exploit it and it turns out this was merely a dry run for the glorious insanity of The Rehearsal.

There are some who are hung up on exactly what is real and what is staged in Fielder’s work but these people are best ignored. They would undoubtedly complain that Picasso’s paintings don’t look exactly like real people and The Waste Land hardly even rhymes.

While working on Nathan for You, Fielder and his team would often attempt to role play what members of the public might say once the cameras were rolling. They invariably struggled to predict what would happen but were amused by the human need to try and control the future, a losing battle since the advent of man. For those of us who rehearse orders in our head before the waiter comes over or refuse to go to a concert without having revised the setlist in advance, this is representation.

The first series of The Rehearsal arrived in the summer of 2022 and was built around a woman pondering motherhood. Elaborate sets and multiple actors were involved in a largely futile bid to help aid the decision on whether or not to have a child. In the second season, Fielder has, somewhat incongruously, turned his attention to aviation safety. Yes, the Comedy Central stalwart believes he knows the reason for the majority of airline crashes and reckons he’s just the man to effect real change. This is not Jeremy Beadle territory.

Fielder has tapped into something primordial with the show, the need to try and feel control over things even when we know we cannot have any. There is a reason people turn to religion or superstition in stressful moments and never has that human impulse been weaponised quite like it is in The Rehearsal. There are no dress rehearsals for life but most of us have had moments we wish there were. Only one madman would actually attempt to fill the void and the result is a work of genius, jaw-dropping and hilarious in equal measure. Future-proofing has never seemed so funny.

Like all art, comedy can seem safe and predictable if you’re exposed to a lot of it. People tend to complain that certain comedies of yesteryear could no longer be made today and yet Fielder is doing the kind of work that wouldn’t be possible then. He is experimenting with form and questioning the very mechanics of television, producing small screen autofiction that is uncategorisable. Ethical questions about his work tend to be addressed pre-emptively within the show and, if the hallmark of comedic greatness is committing to the bit, Fielder has already joined the ranks of the immortals.

• Darren Richman is a writer and journalist.