“Dying is easy,” the expiring comedian is supposed to have said when asked whether it was hard to die. “Comedy is hard.” Just how hard, no one who has not worked in the business can ever understand, so that when a perfectly executed morsel of lowbrow farce like the current production of Enter Laughing: The Musical at the York Theatre comes along, it is in danger of being taken for granted.

Enter Laughing has gone through a number of incarnations. Based (very loosely!) on Carl Reiner’s memories of his youthful beginnings as an actor in the Great Depression, the original play by Joseph Stein (1963) starred Alan Arkin as the goofy young Reiner character, David Kolowitz, and was turned into a movie four years later. In 1974, a score by Stan Daniels was added to turn the property into a Broadway musical, So Long, 174th Street. Despite Daniels’s brilliantly funny lyrics, the show flopped—possibly because of the director Burt Shevelove’s bizarre choice for the role of David: Robert Morse, who had the double disadvantage of being neither young nor Jewish. So Long, 174th Street closed after only two weeks; it now makes its reappearance minus its unwieldy title as—once again—Enter Laughing.

The audience laughed so long and so helplessly throughout the two-and-a-half-hour performance that it seems this musical has finally found its moment—in fact I spotted a Very Big Producer sitting behind me, so presumably a move to Broadway is being contemplated.