Beware professional athletes in suits telling jokes. They are rarely funny.

Why would they be? Spending your careers spouting clichés in interviews is poor training for broadcasting when suddenly you’re expected to say something spontaneous, fresh and provocative. As anyone who has endured the comedy of Terry Bradshaw knows, the result is often stilted jocularity with a rigid towel snap. But there is one notable exception.

Sometime in the last decade or so, “Inside the N.B.A.,” the in-studio program that introduces and concludes basketball doubleheaders on TNT, mainly on Thursdays, stopped being just a basketball show and transformed into one of the most freewheeling, unpredictable and funny talk shows on television.

To be sure, its panelists — the former star players Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal, working with the host, Ernie Johnson — still comment on highlights, make predictions and conduct postgame interviews just as other talking heads on sports shows do. But they treat these conventions as jumping-off points to a very refined brand of goofing around.

Take their recent discussion about who is the best shooting guard in the N.B.A., one of those mostly meaningless debates that are the meat and potatoes of such shows.