Tibor Fischer is a great literary comedian. His Booker-shortlisted debut Under the Frog (1992), a hilarious and moving tale of Hungarian basketball players, established him as one of the most inventive writers of his generation. The novels that followed developed an increasingly surreal comic vision, seemingly intent on finding more and more bizarre ways of making us laugh. In The Thought Gang (1994) a philosopher teams up with a one-armed villain in an intellectual caper story, while in The Collector Collector (1997) an entire novel is narrated by an ornamental bowl.

How to Rule the World features Baxter Stone, a film-maker from south London, and is set in something called the “Vizz”, which one takes to be the world of documentary television. There’s a playful snap, crackle and pop to the prose style and a brutal slapstick quality to the action. A Thai policeman is described as having a “puppy-hammering face”. A series of curious characters with names like Jack the List and Zyklon Annie are introduced and dispatched in set-up-gag rhythm to varying effect. An incompetent academic is particularly well skewered. “He should be cleaning out the cages in a pet shop, a small provincial pet shop, not shaping anyone’s youth.”

As an extended monologue it has tremendous energy; Baxter is constantly riffing on the world around him. “I don’t want to be in this room,” is a repeated mantra at the beginning of the novel, and yet Fischer’s world-weary protagonist is continually working the room, in a tireless tirade that takes us from Tooting to Bangkok, from Jerusalem to Iraq and the Turkish stone circle of Göbekli Tepe.

In his pursuit of the one-liner Fischer has a hardline commitment to the purely comic. In a rare moment of unmediated horror, Baxter witnesses a car-bombing in Baghdad and fails to make a quip: “Some things you can’t make a joke about.” It’s only a matter of time, though, he concludes. “It’s the next generation of Iraqi stand-ups who’ll benefit from that material.”

Baxter’s career has been the pursuit of a documentary that might bring him success and his discourse is one long complaint at the lack of it. The story of the struggling freelancer in a cynical and moribund media milieu is as old as George Gissing’s New Grub Street. There are echoes of Gordon Burn’s Fullalove, a deeply melancholic take on a dying Fleet Street, but How to Rule the World is far too busy to find actual depths of despair. Instead a febrile sense of desperation drives the narrative, though it’s hard to know why the protagonist is quite so bad-tempered, or how much of the spleen vented is shared by the author. When Baxter shares his worldview, it doesn’t seem quite enough to justify his anger. “I get annoyed with those who are convinced they’re being picked on because they are black or gay or trans or come from some strange village or speak with a northern, southern, western, eastern accent, and are missing the big picture: that most of the time we’re all munching shit.” Hmm. Perhaps if Fischer had simply set his novel in the world of publishing he could have come up with something a bit more heartfelt.

Because he is undeniably part of a tradition, an exemplar of the postwar English comic novel, which was once something of a family business. The dystopian “big picture” of his work resembles what Kingsley Amis defined as the “comic inferno” in his 1962 SF survey New Maps of Hell, and Fischer acknowledged Martin Amis’s influence on his clipped, aphoristic style even while he savaged him back in 2003. The metafictional irony is that Fischer’s funniest, most quotable line remains his assessment of the novel Yellow Dog by Amis junior. Dismissing it as “not-knowing-where-to-look-bad”, he likened the experience of reading this once-loved author as “like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating”.

The genius of this line is that it so accurately pinpoints the problem with this kind of comic novel: the extended male rant can too easily be characterised as a kind of avuncular self-pleasuring. There’s a sense that the performer is having more fun than the audience. When cynicism is the method as well as the subject, the conclusions of comedy can be quite dull and reactionary. “It’s very hard to make an audience laugh,” Jerry Seinfeld remarked recently, commenting on the comedian Louis CK who was, literally, caught masturbating in public. “You don’t say: ‘I think I’ll do this, or I think I’ll do that,’ you do whatever you can that they will laugh at.”

For a routine this is enough, but it’s hard to sustain for a whole novel. And despite all the travelling around I never felt we went anywhere. I was reminded of those stadium comedians who walk up and down a massive stage endlessly, as if giving us some sort of journey. Fischer is a great literary comedian, but with this novel there’s not so much a sense of an author running out of steam but a whole genre dying on its feet.

• Jake Arnott’s The Fatal Tree is published by Sceptre. How to Rule the World is published by Corsair. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99..