Séamas O'Reilly: It's hard to describe but this is the comedic masterpiece of the decade

Séamas O'Reilly: The Rehearsal is a triumph of writing and staging, grounded by one of the most naturally gifted comic minds on the planet. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

Trying to articulate why, exactly, things are funny is a time-honoured, and perilous pastime. ‘Humour can be dissected, as a frog can’ wrote E.B. White in 1941, ‘but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind’. This description of comedy is pithy enough that it has sustained itself for the guts of a century, but I’ve never quite agreed with it. 

There are any number of great and fascinating techniques for exploring the mechanics of great comedy, and the best examples of this form are often written with enough wit and verve that they can be quite funny themselves. And then, at some point, I’m faced with the task myself; forced to try and recommend the hilariousness of a book or a show or a film, and finding it near-impossible to put it into words.

How, then, do I describe a show like The Rehearsal, which has just returned to American screens for a second season? With its first series having landed on Prime and Apple+ in the past few weeks, this would be the time for me to recommend it. Perhaps a glance toward their own listings might help. “Nathan Fielder” Amazon writes, “navigates an uncertain world by giving everyday people the opportunity to rehearse for their own lives”.

Not quite right. Let’s try another. “Nathan Fielder” suggests Apple+, “prepares ordinary people for life’s biggest moments by rehearsing them in carefully crafted simulations with a legion of actors”.

This gets a little closer to the gonzo spirit of the show, but it’s not the full enchilada. I could say it’s an absurdist comedy series in which the star of Comedy Central’s Nathan For You erects bafflingly ornate fake worlds so that his subjects can prepare for difficult or traumatic experiences before they happen.

Hmm. Still not quite there. How about: The Rehearsal is a HBO documentary series in which a scrupulously deadpan Canadian comedian creates a sequence of imaginary, or contrived events, in such a way that the show’s real-life participants are sucked deeper and deeper into the most elaborate, and hilarious, alternate realities you’ve ever witnessed.

Well, damn it. Despite all those attempts, I’ve still managed to make The Rehearsal sound like a dry, convoluted mess. I am failing the central object of this column and it is proving stressful. It almost makes me pine for a world in which any person, with any problem, could be given infinite time and resources to practice their task until they get it just perfect.

Thankfully, I don’t have to imagine such a world, because it exists. It is The Rehearsal, and I feel confident in calling it one of the funniest television programs made this decade.

Nathan Fielder made his name with Nathan For You, a Comedy Central show that ran from 2013 to 2017, in which he helped businesses with their problems. To be clear, these were real businesses with real problems, all believing they were taking part in exactly the kind of daytime “help me out” shows that Nathan For You so perfectly apes – albeit, while pitching, and executing, increasingly bizarre and hilarious solutions. 

A realtor who’s struggling to make her mark is teamed up with an exorcist and rebranded as the only seller of “ghost-free” homes in LA County. A local electronics store can’t keep up with the prices on offer at the nearby mega-chain, so a promotion is devised in which his best TVs cost just $1, but only if you wear a tuxedo, enter through a foot-high door, and get past a live alligator.

The joy of Nathan For You is not just in its ludicrously inspired premises, but in both the extraordinary lengths to which the show goes in executing them, and the studiously deadpan performance of the ever-awkward Fielder as he tries, and mostly succeeds, to make these insane ideas seem reasonable to real live members of the public.

With The Rehearsal, Fielder takes all these stakes and raises them to the level of high art, crafting scenarios of such bewildering complexity that barely a minute goes by without you gasping in slack-jawed admiration.

In the show’s first ever episode, Nathan meets Kor, a Brooklyn man who, years ago, told his beloved quiz team he had a master’s degree, when he does not. He wants to tell his friend Tricia the truth, but worries she might lose all respect for him when he does so. Fielder’s solution is for him to prepare for this tough conversation via the Rehearsal strategies which give the show its name; building elaborate sets of both Kor’s home and his favourite bar, where they can rehearse the conversation he needs to have. We see an actress studying Tricia’s mannerisms during an interview set up under false pretences, and watch as Fielder stresses over making sure Kor performs well in the quiz, which he knows will help his anxiety. His solution – in which he obtains the questions from the quizmaster ahead of time and has teams of extras casually reveal the answers to Kor during an evening stroll through Manhattan – results in one of the funniest pieces of television I have ever seen.

The rest of the series follows suit, going into increasingly convoluted directions until Nathan is helping another man with an inheritance claim, training dozens of actors in The Fielder Method he’s devised to achieve the show’s effects, and is himself rehearsing the experience of having a son, using dozens of child actors of different ages.

On a wider scale, The Rehearsal functions as a meta-comedy on the nesting absurdities of the show’s ludicrous conceits and the function of documentaries themselves. At root, however, it’s a triumph of writing and staging, grounded by one of the most naturally gifted comic minds on the planet.

If, after all that, you believe me when I say The Rehearsal is the comedic masterpiece of this decade, then I am satisfied. It may have taken me a while, but I persisted. And practice makes perfect.