know our mental bandwidth is currently taken up with managing life under pandemic conditions without the help of anyone who seems to know what they’re doing, so let us lay out the conceit of BBC Two’s new US import Dave as clearly as possibly.

Dave is a comedy about Dave, a neurotic white Jewish rapper who goes by the name Lil Dicky (the show’s creator and star is, as it happens, the white Jewish comedian Dave Burd, who raps under the name Lil Dicky). Real Dave became a YouTube sensation in 2013 when one of his songs went viral. He has parlayed this into a legitimate sitcom for the US cable channel FXX which has now reached our shores. Similarly, fictional Dave becomes a YouTube sensation when one of his songs goes viral, and he tries to parlay his success into a legitimate rap career. A lot of Dave (the series) is about Dave’s (the character) penis. The first episode’s opening scene is set in a doctor’s office. There, Dave is explaining during an STI check up that he was born with “a tangled urethra” and the operations performed used his scrotum skin (“You know how it’s like chicken skin?”) to repair the shaft (“So my theory is that my dick is made of balls”) and left much scarring. It is a situation we return to a lot.

Burd has said in interviews that everything about Dave’s penis is true. This presumably includes the further information disclosed in episode three (entitled “hypospadias” – and I will save you the time and trouble here too: it’s when the pee hole is located on the underside rather than tip of your Lil Urine Drainer.) Dave/presumably Burd has a further complication in that another surgery resulted in a secondary pee hole, too, which he has to cover with his finger whenever he goes for a wee. It is not absolutely clear whether “Lil Dicky” or Lil Dicky (ie “Dave” or Dave) actually has a small penis. I have done some research. I am not doing any more.

If you think this is too much about penises I would recommend that you don’t watch Dave. It is very funny about penises every time they are mentioned, but I accept that it’s a lot of mentions.

In the sitcom, as well as a scarred and over-perforated penis, Dave also has a girlfriend called Ally (Taylor Misiak, in an admirably well-written and developed part that gives her attitude and personality as well as the patience and understanding to deal with a man who won’t let her see his penis, talk dirty in bed or believe that he will not become the greatest entertainer in history). There’s also scabrous room mate (Andrew Santino), a best friend (Elz, with whom he has been pals since junior summer camp and who already has a toehold in the business as a sound engineer, played by Travis ‘Taco’ Bennett) and – by the end of the first episode a hype man, GaTa (Burd’s real-life hype man who has been gigging with real-life Lil Dicky since the 2013 video).

It’s an ecstatically painful cringe-comedy that follows Dave’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the true talents of the rap world. In among the gags it also manages to make some cogent and cutting points about race (Dave’s obliviousness to his literal and metaphorical intrusionson the scene is white privilege writ large), class (witness the moment Elz, who is black, tries to argue with the – definitely economically disadvantaged GaTa – that Elz, too, is poor because only his dentist parents have money. “As soon as I left home – pfft!” he insists), and masculinity. The last is perhaps least tangibly demonstrated, but there’s definitely something to be learned from the story of a man who gets away with doing nothing for his girlfriend in bed, who can exploit his fears and weaknesses (“It’s actually a super-intellectual commentary on hypermasculinity”) for gain without anyone being able truly to assail him or dislodge his underlying self-confidence, and what it tells us about how easily winning comes to some.

For all that it does this, though – while remaining properly, deeply funny throughout – Dave does feel like we are past the peak of manbaby comedy. The foundations on which its success was built are crumbling – social tolerances are lower, consciousnesses raised. More voices are coming. Maybe even some without penises! We’ll see.