LAB RATS
BBC2, 9.30pm
TOUCH ME, I'M KAREN TAYLOR
BBC3, 10.30pm

If you ask me (and even if you don't, I'm going to tell you anyway), when it comes to comedy we're far too soft on silliness. We say we love whimsy and elevate its practitioners - whether it be Spike Milligan, Monty Python or Vic and Bob - to the comedy premier league quicker than an EPO-assisted athlete running the 100m Olympic final.

Thing is, though, have you actually watched any of those early TV outings of Reeves and Mortimer lately? Outwith the bubble of time they first appeared in, they feel very flimsy. Furthermore, I don't care what Prince Charles says, the Goons were little more than silly voices in search of something funny to say. And while I've been known to snigger at Python, you can't tell me - Life of Brian apart - that it was ever much more than clever undergraduate humour, with none of the heft or weight or depth of a script by Clement and La Frenais or Galton and Simpson.

No? OK, final question. If you had to choose between Python and, say, Fawlty Towers, which would you go for? Anyone who answered the former, turn the page now. You're probably beyond help.

Whimsy only really works when it's well anchored, when the world it operates in is fully realised. And so in The Mighty Boosh, we are always aware that Vince and Howard are made up of the same mix of ambition and fallibility as Hancock. They just prefer silver jumpsuits to astrakhan collars. The priests on Craggy Island may operate in a world of Irish clerical surrealism but at heart they were still three men stuck in a place they don't want to be, a bit like Slade Prison.

In the end what makes British comedy funny is not the appearance of giant snails, or hairy-palmed priests, but the possibility of failure and hubris. Well, I say that, but the giant snail that appears at the end of the first episode of Lab Rats is admittedly quite amusing. And obviously quite silly. But good silly. Which seems a reasonable summary of Chris Addison's new sitcom. It's also some way distant to Addison's last sitcom appearance in that poison pen letter to Westminster, The Thick of It.

Apart from the odd resort to industrial language, Lab Rats is a much more mainstream proposition. That was presumably the intention (the flat, nothing-to-look at sitcom lighting it uses certainly suggests as much, as does a berth on BBC2 rather than BBC3). It's not a bad attempt as it goes, mixing up both verbal and visual humour to giggly effect. There are comedy accents, obvious but still amusing set-ups ("Most people would be upset about losing the Nobel Prize?" lab technician Addison asks his workshy professor at one point. "Where did you last see it?"), and comedy props (pink labcoats, giant lemons and giant snails - bit of a theme developing there, perhaps).

Compare with the first episode of the second series of Touch Me, I'm Karen Taylor, over on BBC3. Taylor's comedy is much more scatological, more puerile (her sex education teacher Miss Harper's best line is when she asks any boys in the class unsure of anything to "come and see me after school, but not necessarily in that order") and ultimately less amusing. Taylor's performance is not the problem, though. It's the material.

Near the start there's a sketch set in a nightclub. The camera zooms in and out and shakes back and forth in a cheap simulation of the nightclub experience as Taylor tells her dancing partner about how she spent her day in the supermarket with her sister and her sister dropped her peas and she picked them up. Her dancing partner can't hear her so she starts shouting "I picked up her peas" as the music suddenly fades.

That punchline probably wasn't worth typing out. It certainly wasn't worth filming. But it does show that there's something worse in comedy than being silly. That's being stupid.