Behold the rise of the joke candidate, from Andy Burnham to Donald Trump

We have drifted into a strange nexus where the riotously humorous and the profoundly grave meet

It may be a natural reaction against the soul-crushing seriousness of the age, or nothing more than freakish good luck, but the Anglo-American world has never known a more golden era for the joke political candidate.

Before we look across the Atlantic at the all-time champion of this genre, a glance at the domestic scene unveils three characters who are regarded, if not in all their cases fairly, or necessarily by themselves, as inherently comic seekers of high office.

While I revere Sol Cambell, the property tycoon who hopes to be Tory candidate for London mayor in return for his efforts at the heart of the Spurs defence, he is ready to be mayor of nowhere on this planet (which includes the towns of Trumpton and Camberwick Green). After Campbell revealed his ignorance of basic policy in a radio interview and last minute absenteeism from a hustings, Zac Goldsmith will lose no sleep.

Things also look a bit bleak in the longer term for the music hall turn whom Campbell wishes to succeed. Boris Johnson’s deployment of his comic talent to turbo charge an insurgent run for the Conservative leadership seems finally to be failing him. Clinically humiliated by Theresa May over that masterplan to bring the water cannon to London’s streets, and apparently failing to impress backbench colleagues, you sense that his ambition to become PM (not of course that he has any) may have died a few moments after 10pm on 7 May when that gut-wrenching exit poll flashed on to the screen.

As for the three mainstream candidates for the Labour leadership who thought it droll to encourage supporters to hoist Jeremy Corbyn on to the shortlist, they are not, to borrow from Bob Monkhouse, laughing now. Corbyn has emerged as the most serious candidate by dint of having and being able to express principles. In this topsy-turvy bedlam, it is Andy Burnham, who originally appeared the most credible, who has become the true joke of the field after a pair of retractions on Monday crystallised a career of comically cynical vacillation. This political shape-shifter – who journeyed from slavish Blairite, via avid Brownite, to God-only-knows what – said he would vote against the Tory welfare cuts, and then abstained. On the same day, he said that, if elected, he will give Corbyn a Shadow Cabinet job. The next minute, a spokesperson was deputed to insist, risibly, that he had been joking.

There are piffling little political gags like Burnham, of course, and then there are side-splittingly, ribcage-shattereringly, bladder-control-underminingly hilarious ones like Donald Trump. Running for the Republican presidential nomination once again on the “I’m worth $10bn and you ain’t” platform, his latest efforts somehow dwarf those of four years ago.

In 2011, his proselytising of the Birther cause led Obama to release the birth certificate which confirmed his entry point into this world not as Mombasa, as the mad folk of the Tea Party still like to believe, but Hawaii. This time round, Trump yanked up the crazy by depicting Mexican immigrants as rapists, and by attacking John McCain for spending five years, under torture, in the Vietnamese prison ironically known as the Hanoi Hilton. “He’s not a war hero,” said Trump of the 2008 candidate who brought you Sarah Palin. “He’s a war hero because he was captured? I like people who weren’t captured.”

It isn’t only the hair (if hair it is) that raises doubts as to whether The Donald is a human being. Although it undeniably helps, even Kojak-bald this high priest of deranged bombast would closer resemble the figment of a fifth-rate satirist’s mescaline-fuelled nightmare than an organic life form. Yet here he is, a cruder professional controversialist than Jeremy Clarkson, running for the leadership of the free world. Admittedly, his rantings affected his polling figures. Where before he was mid-division among a bewildering number of candidates (most of them minor comic characters themselves), he now leads the field by several points.

All of which is a wistful joy for that first-rate satirist Jon Stewart as he prepares to leave The Late Show bully pulpit from which he has wittily established himself as America’s most serious political commentator. Stewart’s agonised, sub-Munch’s The Scream gurning when he learned that Trump was launching a campaign he wouldn’t be around to enjoy professionally, is well worth a look on YouTube.

Of course, Trump will no more be the Republican candidate than Sol Campbell will be Mayor of London. It now seems a long shot that Boris will succeed David Cameron, or that Labour – however much its members admire and share his beliefs – will entrust the trivial task of rediscovering its mass appeal to Jeremy Corbyn. Those widely perceived as joke candidates, however unfairly, almost never make it (though we must not and could not forget Iain Duncan Smith).

Even so, when during the early stages of the race for the White House a comedian has the gravitas, while the GOP’s front runner is even funnier than Jon Stewart, we have drifted into a strange nexus where the riotously humorous and the profoundly grave meet; a metapolitical fantasy land where the relationship between comedy and power has become wickedly distorted.

Nothing in that unnerving nexus is as dangerous as North Korea, because if the hilarity distracts enough attention from the scary stuff, the world might just laugh itself to death. On that basis, it is probably a good thing that Western democracies seldom (and no, I haven’t forgotten Berlusconi) reward joke figures with serious power. No one could pretend it’s an easy sacrifice to make – but on balance you would reluctantly agree to give up the untold merriment to keep Donald Trump’s fingers, and even perhaps Boris Johnson’s, away from those nuclear codes.