Tim Vine, one of the three stars of “Not Going Out,” the new BBC America sitcom beginning tonight at 8:40 p.m., holds the Guinness World Record for telling the most jokes (499) in one hour. Yet here he plays the straight man (Tim) to fellow comedian Lee Mack (Lee), a verbally hyperkinetic wisecracker who sounds as if he could tell at least as many jokes in half the time.

This is a pretty good sign for a sitcom, even a fairly conventional one about a group of 30-somethings who float on a vague cloud of unreality and show little desire to come down. Certainly there’s a wealth of available talent. Rounding out the trio is Megan Dodds (Kate), a gifted comedienne herself, though probably best known in America for having played the lead in the controversial play “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” both at the Royal Court Theatre in London and in the off-Broadway production at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York.

Ms. Dodds is an American actress who lives in London, and she plays an American in this show. What’s nice about it is that as “the American,” she is treated as being only faintly foreign — different, yes, but not vastly so, except for her affinity for health food, which the Englishmen around her find inedible, and for her more direct approach to problem-solving than is shown by Tim and Lee. (The pair generally take their problems to the pub, and after a few hours, leave them there, forgotten and unsolved.) In the second episode, for instance, Kate suggests that Lee see a therapist. The therapist is also American, and her nationality is played; but again, there’s no malice in it, though there is fun. All of which is quite unusual for British television.

Kate is in publishing, not that we see her at work, and much of the action takes place in her apartment, which doesn’t look like the typical apartment in an American sitcom, though it functions in precisely the same way. Tim, who’s middle-class, has a respectable job of some kind, while Lee, who’s working-class and from up north, is the congenital loser (dressed as a gorilla, he passes out flyers to children who beat him up). Somewhat improbably, he and Tim are best friends.

But a strain has entered the relationship. Tim is Kate’s ex-boyfriend (he left her for a 23-year-old, which he now regrets, particularly since the 23-year-old soon left him), while Lee is Kate’s new roommate, though how he could cough up even one-tenth of the rent is anyone’s guess. Though there’s nothing romantic going on between Kate and Lee, it’s apparent between the lines of their mock-antagonistic banter that they enjoy each other’s company. Tim, who’s a bit of a drip despite nominally being the successful one, is quietly jealous about this and still feels guilty about having left Kate in the first place.

At the pub, where he and Lee frequently repair for a drink and a budget-friendly change of scenery, Tim tries to explain why he broke up with Kate. The ensuing dialogue goes like this:

Tim: I suppose me and Kate were sort of at this crossroads in our relationship. There were only two choices we could make.

Lee: Three choices. At a crossroads you can go left, right, or straight on.

Tim: Whatever. The point is, we were at a crossroads…

Lee: T-junction.

Tim: Alright, T-junction! The thing is…

Lee: Check your mirror.

Tim: Shut up.

It’s a perfect encapsulation of the male delight in turning every conversation into the equivalent of a 60-meter dash, in which no one gets farther than 10 meters. And that’s the thing about “Not Going Out”: The writing is often clever and funny, even when the material is less so. “You know what they say,” Tim remarks in the same pub scene. “No man is an island.” To which Lee retorts: “What about the Isle of Man, then?”

You can treat it as an irritating mental pathology — or “displacement,” as the American therapist does — or you can find it amusing. It’s both, of course, and Kate, who sends Lee to the therapist in the first place, is smart enough to realize it.

Kate’s a charmer, but the star is incontestably Mr. Mack, who also serves as a writer on the show. In an amusing scene, Lee is on a date with a morbid memoirist whose life is one long tale of woe. So Lee decides to make up a tale of woe himself. It turns out he was abandoned by his parents, adopted, and brought up in Tokyo.

Under the impression that his adoptive parents were his own, little Lee couldn’t understand why none of the children at school looked like him. So when he was 8, his father finally sat him down and explained that he was not, in fact, his biological father. At this point in the story, Mr. Mack begins speaking in a wickedly thick Japanese accent … It’s stand-up comedy as much as situation comedy, but who’s complaining?

bbernhard@nysun.com