Watch This Funny Canadian: The New Yorker The Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder has a Comedy Central show "Nathan For You," in which he helps struggling small-business owners implement marketing strategies that, though seemingly very stupid, often sort of work. He convinces a frozen-yogurt shop to attract customers by featuring "poo"-flavored ice cream, persuades a caricature artist to draw racially insensitive, sexually explicit portraits that amuse rather than offend his subjects, gets a shopping-mall Santa to offer discounted photos with kids during the summer, and helps a pizza place guarantee delivery in eight minutes or less. In the show's second episode - the most remarkable instance of one of these misguided plans panning out - Fielder, who has an undergraduate degree in business from a Canadian university (in the opening credits he boasts that he got "really good grades" while a shot of his transcript reveals mostly B's and C s), assists a petting zoo in creating a "star" animal by shooting a fake video of a pig rescuing a goat, an undertaking that involves scuba divers, animal trainers, humane-society representatives, and the construction of an underwater plastic track to guide the pig. When the show's producers uploaded the video to YouTube under a pseudonym last September, months before "Nathan For You" premièred, its viral power far exceeded their expectations. The video was picked up by Gawker, Brian Williams's "NBC Nightly News," "Good Morning America," and Fox News, among others, before it was revealed to be fake. "Nathan For You," with its mock-reality TV format and its prank scenarios involving unsuspecting ordinary people, contains shades of Sacha Baron Cohen's "Da Ali G Show" and of the nineties Canadian absurdist Tom Green's "The Tom Green Show." But unlike those projects, which relied largely on shock value and their ability to make audiences squirm, and unlike Ashton Kutcher-style pranksterism that makes naïve participants the butt of the joke, "Nathan For You" is unusually subtle and kind-hearted. The season finale airs tonight. Fielder guides participants through his insane promotion plans with a deadpan earnestness that is almost always socially awkward. But instead of letting his scenarios escalate to excruciating extremes, Fielder takes them in unexpected directions; his outrageous ideas occasionally elicit anger but, more often, they bring out people's kindness and obliging good humor. He discusses girl problems with the pizza-delivery boy after their promotion plan goes awry. He gets a cocky teen-ager to offer a straight-faced apology for drawing penises on an ad poster featuring his (Fielder's) face. In one incredible segment, he devises a plan for a gas-station owner to sell gas for under two dollars per gallon by offering a rebate that customers can redeem only by hiking to the top of a mountain. I won't spoil the ending, except to say that the segment lampoons the self-seriousness and performative sentimentality of reality TV shows while also managing, somehow, to be genuinely touching. Some "Nathan For You" segments depart from the business-consulting model and feature Fielder carrying out his own self-improvement strategies, like a "Bachelor"-style reality TV show called "The Hunk," devised to help him overcome his nervousness around women. Last week, in a full-episode arc, Fielder prepared for and performed an elaborate stunt that involved freeing himself from handcuffs before a robotic arm, dubbed "The Claw of Shame," could pull down his pants and underwear, exposing him to a crowd of children and thereby turning him into a sex offender. That episode replicates the visual and narrative conventions of a big-budget game show so fully that you at times forget how idiotic the premise is. It's packed, like the other "Nathan For You" episodes, with tons of small visual jokes that can only be appreciated by watching. So watch.