The television series with the most incisive take on the 21st-century economy returns for its third season on Thursday night, but it’s not from Bloomberg or CNBC. Look for it on Comedy Central.

It’s called “Nathan for You,” and if its star, a Canadian comic named Nathan Fielder, wasn’t shortlisted for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, he should have been. That prize just went to Angus Deaton of Princeton for improving the way some economic indicators are measured, but it could have gone to Mr. Fielder for illuminating the relationship between the economy and absurdity.

In “Nathan for You,” Mr. Fielder spends most of his time trying to help small-business owners improve their bottom lines, using techniques that presumably are not being taught at Princeton or anywhere else. There was, for instance, an episode last season in which he deduced that a liquor store owner’s problem was that he wasn’t selling to minors.

“No business should ever have to turn away a paying customer,” he explained.

And so he came up with a system that, he thought, could give a minor the thrill and social cachet of buying alcoholic beverages but avoid the problems associated with drinking them. He told the store owner to sell booze to children, then put the bottles in storage while giving the young customers claim checks — they could come back and retrieve their purchases when they turned 21.