It wasn’t until the joke about passing gas that I realized that Richard Bean’s riotous crowd-pleaser “One Man, Two Guvnors” is an awfully smart show.


To be clear: It’s not a particularly thoughtful take on flatulence, but when James Corden’s Francis Henshall breaks wind in the second act with a self-satisfied smile, it serves a strategic purpose.


Francis, a lovable ex-skiffle band player scrambling to work for two bosses, is setting up an uncharacteristically knowing speech about the centuries-old Italian form commedia dell’arte, a nod to the show’s source material, Goldoni’s “Servant of Two Masters.” It’s the only moment when the show gets ahead of the audience and appears to inflate its own significance. The joke, excuse me, lets the air out.


English comedy popular in America is generally more refined. Revivals of Wilde, Coward and Shaw are a regular part of our theatrical diet. Quick-tongued performers like Eddie Izzard, Daniel Kitson and Russell Brand wear their erudition on their sleeves. Much of the British sketch tradition emerges from Oxford and Cambridge (Monty Python, Beyond the Fringe), as opposed to the rough-and-tumble improv world that serves as the farm team for “Saturday Night Live.” Chicago-style, long-form improv remains rare in London.


“One Man,” by contrast, embraces English traditions that are more obscure here, although they occasionally show up on Broadway in finely tuned comedies like “Noises Off” and “The Play What I Wrote.” The director Nicholas Hytner, the justly celebrated artistic director of the National Theater, which produced “One Man,” has created an unapologetic celebration of British lowbrow comedy. Set in the seaside town of Brighton in the early 1960s, this gleefully silly production is filled with rigorously clever physical jokes, juvenile wit and an exhilarating improvisational spirit.


This is dumb comedy done smartly. To understand how difficult that is, look no further than "Don’t Dress for Dinner," another pants-dropping, pun-filled new Broadway show whose oversold jokes seem to insult the audience’s intelligence. A British adaptation of a French farce staged by an American director, the show feels like a mutt of a drama, unlike "One Man."


Mr. Bean has compared his perpetually hungry hero, Francis, to Norman Wisdom, a singing, pratfalling comedian whose endearing fool persona brings to mind a less anxious Jerry Lewis. Since Mr. Wisdom is relatively unknown here, the Broadway audience might be more likely to think of Benny Hill, particularly because of the chase scenes.


Mr. Corden does a magnificent job evoking an ordinary bloke while exuding extraordinary charm. The show nods to farce and pantomime. But mostly what “One Man” evokes is the rambunctious music hall, a British cousin to vaudeville, where the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel got their start. In between scenes, a dynamite band, the Craze, nimbly mimics a variety of English pop bands, including early-’60s Beatles, right down to the way Ringo Starr bobbed his head.


These driving, joyous interludes help turn a well-made comic play into an entertainment with the lift of an exhilarating musical. This mixing of show business genres is characteristic of music hall, whose performers mocked authority, upper-class snobbery and the way a hint of sex could turn grown men into smirking children.


“In England, subversive comedy has traditionally found its form in music hall,” The New Yorker critic Penelope Gilliatt once wrote, adding that its cadences live on in things like the decades-long “Carry On” series, British comedy’s answer to Hammer Films. “Music hall may be dead, but its gags are inextinguishable,” she wrote.


Just because these traditions are relatively obscure to Americans today doesn’t make them less accessible. For one thing, physical comedy travels well. But the spirit of this show will also be familiar, since the greatest American comedians balance smart and dumb. Woody Allen obviously has affection for a Borscht Belt one-liner and a clownish spill. In her best seller “Bossypants” Tina Fey wrote that she tries to keep her writer’s room at “30 Rock” packed with equal numbers of pointy-headed Ivy League wits and visceral improv performers who “will do whatever it takes to win that audience over.”


Comparisons between English and American humor always seem to exaggerate the differences, as anyone who has heard British sneering about our inability to appreciate irony can attest. The British “Office” may be more caustic than the American version, but can you really draw a sweeping conclusion about national sensibilities when that series was partly inspired by the American “Larry Sanders Show,” a far more biting send-up of talk show vacuity than the funny British satire “Knowing Me Knowing You” (with Steve Coogan as Alan Partridge)?


Still, among the English cultural elite, there does seem to be more of a history of condescension toward lowbrow, light entertainments. Shaw wrote, “One of the strongest objections to the institution of monogamy is the existence of its offspring, the conventional farcical comedy.”


In Trevor Griffiths’s 1975 play, “Comedians,” set in a Manchester class for aspiring stand-up performers, the sympathetic teacher, Eddie, preaches against jokes rooted in ugly stereotypes or merely aiming for a cheap laugh.


British insecurity about such humor can still be found in the recent HBO special “Talking Funny,” a filmed conversation involving the comedy greats Louis CK, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Ricky Gervais. In the most contentious and hilarious exchange, Louis CK confesses to loving dumb jokes without guilt, recalling fondly a guitar-playing comic who transformed the classic Otis Redding hit “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay” into something too obscene to print in a family publication by slightly changing a few words, including “dock” and “bay.” Twenty-five years later, Louis CK said, this joke stuck with him. Mr. Seinfeld and Mr. Rock agreed it was funny, but Mr. Gervais, the British comic, mocked them, cackling, insisting the joke worked only ironically.


On the question of dumb jokes, “One Man” sides with the American stand-ups. Not once do the performers deliver gags with a “Can you believe I said that?” smile. What makes the show work is how earnestly committed the performers are, although that doesn’t mean that they won’t laugh at themselves.


At the performance I attended, Mr. Corden made a pun, paused, turned his head to the audience, his eyes expanding in anticipation. “In Britain, that would have killed,” he said. That may be true, but it got a big laugh here as well.