Around 1972, Albert Brooks made a short film called "The Famous School for Comedians" for — I'm doing this from memory so I may be wrong — a PBS program called The Great American Dream Machine. It was based on an article of the same name that he'd done for Esquire, all about a supposed place of higher learning for folks who wanted to become comics. Reportedly, Brooks was amazed at how many people read the article or saw the film and then asked in all seriousness, how they could go about enrolling. I suppose if you didn't realize it was a joke you didn't have much of a future in the fast-paced world of Professional Comedy.
As far as I know, the film is currently unavailable. But around 1974, Milton Berle hosted a couple of pilots for a proposed talk show in which he'd sit around with various comedians, new and old, discussing the art and science of making audiences laugh. The series never went anywhere but one of the pilots featured Albert Brooks as a guest…and it really was quite amazing. Brooks topped Uncle Miltie at every turn and you could tell that though Berle tried to be a good sport about it, he was not pleased with the way the interview went. (The two pilots were released many years ago as a VHS tape and Laserdisc called Milton Berle's Mad World of Comedy. I don't think there's ever been a DVD release…and I'll warn you if you want to hunt it down, apart from the Brooks/Berle dust-up, it was a pretty tedious show.)
Anyway, they ran two minutes of Brooks's "Famous School for Comedians" film on that show — sweetened with phony laughter, which kind of adds an extra layer to the whole joke. Someone put that two minutes up on YouTube and now I'll shut up and let you watch it…