Nathan for You: Docu-reality series is unlike any comedy you've ever seen

When Barry Humphries was a teenager, in the years before the emergence of Dame Edna Everage, he would delight in ingenious public pranks. One such caper involved him instructing friends to stand at specific points on different train platforms. He would board a train and, as the doors opened for each stop, his pals would hand him a certain aspect of his breakfast without a word. At stop one, a teacup. Stop two, he would be poured the cup of tea. Stop three, he would be passed a plate. Stop four, a slice of toast... This would continue until the young Humphries had consumed a full breakfast and the people of Melbourne were utterly baffled.

There is something beautiful about this stunt given the performers were the only ones in on the joke and the Australian comedian has always maintained such rejection of logic was a nod to Dadaism. Nathan for You has recently returned to television screens, the funniest new show of the past few years, and one that occupies a similar space in the Venn diagram overlap between comedy and performance art.

Nathan for You stars comedian Nathan Fielder as a version of himself. This is a docu-reality series with the premise that struggling businesses turn to Nathan because, as the opening credits unreliably inform us, he “graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades”. Fielder, a reveller in Situationist chaos to rival Andy Kaufman, offers outlandish solutions in his role as management consultant, but that satirical spin on commercialism only tells half the story.

This is a programme about moments of human connection. Where Trigger Happy TV would concoct an unlikely scenario and worry less about the reaction, Nathan is at his best when forging a meaningful connection with those he encounters. By way of example, in the very first episode he is called in to assist a struggling pizzeria. The idea is simple; a guarantee that unless your pizza is delivered in less than eight minutes, you will get a second one free. The only catch is that the second pizza, to ensure the restaurant doesn’t lose money, is an inch big. The nature of human beings means that the vast majority laugh when confronted with their free pizza while a select few react rather less positively. One such punter simply refuses to pay and Nathan trudges back to the teenage delivery boy, pizza in hand, and suggests they eat it themselves. The pair sit on the bonnet of the car and the young man opens up about his difficulties with the opposite sex. There are no jokes in this section, just two people having an honest conversation about their inadequacies. It is a far cry from the work of Jeremy Beadle.

It is as though Fielder has discovered an entirely new way to be funny, creating a universe in which the return of a Bill Gates impersonator is cause for celebration, a clothing company promotes holocaust awareness and a struggling coffee shop can rebrand itself as “Dumb Stabucks” due to a legal loophole. The latter caused a national sensation with many erroneously assuming it was the work of Banksy – not bad going for a 21-minute TV show on Comedy Central.

The latest series was preceded by an hour-long special entitled Nathan for You: A Celebration, in which Fielder checked in with former guests. Such is the devotion of the fanbase that viewers couldn’t help but feel disappointed that their own personal favourite might not have made an appearance. No two viewers would be likely to name the same favourite segment, such is the consistency of this extraordinary programme.

With comedy, it is all too easy to look back on previous generations and suggest they were golden ages for the form. Humour has to adapt to survive, however, and recent offerings like Review, Broad City and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia have pushed things forward in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. Nathan for You might just be the most innovative of the lot, a show quite unlike anything in the medium’s history. At the heart of it all is the most unlikely figure, a man on record as saying: “I seem to get into situations that make people laugh, but I don’t consider myself that funny of a person. I’m not witty. I’m kind of slow in conversations. I’m not that articulate with jokes. The first time I made stuff and screened it for an audience, I was surprised what people were laughing at.”

Fielder is an antidote to the slick comics with their carefully honed routines but he’s undoubtedly a true original and Nathan for You is nothing short of a masterpiece.

This article was originally published on 2 October 2017