I don't know what's bothering Marc Lottering, but I know what's bothering me. It's Marc Lottering. It is a very frustrating experience, watching Marc Lottering. Marc Lottering is a good idea, poorly executed. You want Marc Lottering to be funny, you hope Marc Lottering will be funny, by all rights Marc Lottering should be funny, but Marc Lottering, on the evidence of his second television series, What's Bothering Marc Lottering? (SABC3; Tuesday; 10pm) is not funny.

It was something of a wonder that Marc Lottering's reputation for being funny survived his first series, Marc Lottering and Friends. That series, if I can manage to remember it without involuntarily curling up in a foetal position and wrapping myself in a snuggly blankie until the bad feelings go away, was a patchily put-together grab-bag of bad lighting and worse jokes, a so-called variety show of such spectacular ineptitude that it made me yearn for another series of Big Okes. Rather than watch another episode, I would rather sit cross-legged in a bath of cold water, sticking sharpened pencils in my eye. What's Bothering Marc Lottering? is worse.

The show features Marc Lottering and, well, some friends. I don't know if they are the same friends from Marc Lottering and Friends, but if they are, I would recommend they all get out a bit more and meet new people. With friends like those, who needs enemies?

Each week Marc Lottering, who both presents the show and courageously admits to writing it, explores some burning issue in a variety of allegedly humorous ways. It would not be correct to call the show satirical. Satire has to have some sort of point. Satire without a point is sarcasm, but this show isn't even sufficiently sophisticated to be called sarcastic. The burning issue this week was "Passing your driver's licence exam". Not perhaps as much burning as it is quietly smouldering, but still sufficient raw material for a humorist, you would think. You would think in vain. In a kind of mock talk show, Lottering pretends to interview a number of diabolically poor drama students - friends of his, you have to imagine - who in turn pretend to be a variety of recognisable South African cliches. I say "pretend" rather than "act", because acting implies more than merely speaking in a broad accent.

Hilariously, this week we were treated to a caricature of a pregnant, barefoot Afrikaans woman from Cradock, who is too poor to afford a car. Apparently the fact that she lives in Cradock was extremely humorous, for reasons that escaped me, because they kept repeating it in that tone of voice that unfunny people use when they think they are saying a punchline. Like unfunny people anywhere, they repeat the punchline again and again, assuming that people didn't laugh the first time because they hadn't heard properly.

When I tell you that the highpoint of the skit was the revelation that the Afrikaans lady had a trolley in which she pushed her son Florrie, you will understand why after the show I took myself off and rinsed my eyes and doused my ears with a warm saline solution in order to wash away the bunkum to which I had subjected them. "Ja, Florrie in the trolley," said the Afrikaans lady. "Ha ha, Florrie in the trolley, that's what I always say." This line, I kid you not, was presented as funny. I am not making it less funny by quoting out of context. There was no context.

Later, some other schlub pretends to be an undercover policewoman who exposes a corrupt licensing officer. The hilarious part of this scene is that the undercover policewoman is wearing a tightish t-shirt. "Just goes to show," says Marc Lottering hilariously, "that you can be an undercover cop without being under many covers, ha ha ha." Except of course when he says it, it is very funny because he speaks in a Cape Flats accent. Do you see what I am trying to say here? Oh, please don't make me repeat any more of that show. And yet still Marc Lottering has a lot of goodwill. People so badly want him to be funny that they persuade themselves that he was funnier than he was. Even the reaction to his show is telling. "It's a shame," people say, "because he could do so much better." I used to agree, but I am beginning to wonder. How many times do you have to be bad before it becomes fair to wonder if you can be good? It's one thing to have bad sets and low budgets and no rehearsal time and an amateurish cast - that is entirely understandable, given the local production conditions - but bad writing is something else entirely. If you really are a good writer, you can't write badly. That is something that can't be faked.

Going in search of authentic local laughs, I tuned in to Felicia on e. Felicia was pretending to interview some woman named Donette who claimed to have been tricked into getting divorced. Twice. Once might be considered careless, but twice qualifies you for a conversation with Felicia. Each time Donette remarried the offending tricksters. "Why?" asked Felicia, uncharacteristically showing an interest in someone else's story. "Oh, I didn't want to," Donette assured her proudly. I had to feel sorry for Donette. Life can't be easy when you're a cretin.

The Felicia show does feature an uncommon shrewd piece of advertising placement. Where better than Felicia to see the new Senokot advert? "When you have a big day ahead, the last thing you need is constipation," a voice informed us brightly. "Oh, I don't know," I found myself telling the screen. "I could think of worse things. Diarrhoea, say. Or leprosy." But then I realised I was talking to the laxative advert. This is what comes of watching Marc Lottering and Felicia on the same day. Don't try this at home.