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Some armchair theorising off the top of my head:
For most people (ie, not music reviewers) Rock 'n' Roll has become background music - on iPods, adverts, clips of the best goals this week, TV trailers, car stereos, and so on and so frigging on. We hear it more but listen to it less; it's no longer an event in itself but an accompaniment to other things.
It's more difficult to treat a comedy show as wallpaper. You pretty much have to focus on what's being shown and said. And as people invest more energy in a thing, it starts to matter more to them.
Plus, alternative comedy can fulfill most of the traditional goals of indie music - it can be (or, at least, seem to be) subversive, sticking two fingers up at authority and annoying your parents (which is the only thing that can possibly account for the success of Bo Selecta).
If you ad in to the mix a couple of guys who're young, moderately good-looking and dress like old-style Rock rebels, well, it's not too hard to figure out the rest.
Plus, comedy still seems to have somewhere to go - new areas to explore, new boundaries to push, etc. As "Brass Eye" and "Jerry Springer - the Opera" have shown, it's still possible to get the nation in an uproar about comedy. Compare that to the woefully self-referential world of Rock where bad behaviour and excess (a la Pete Doherty) are viewed with soap opera relish.
The only problem with all this is that the vast majority of comedy trying to pass itself off as alternative and challenging is just tepid posturing carefully packaged to look like rebellion. My God! Comedy really is the new Rock 'n' Roll!
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