One Flute Note/Body Not Fit for Purpose, Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler's Wells

One of the dance world's better-kept secrets is the existence of a brilliantly inventive comic double-act consisting of two paunchy, balding 50-something men.

Neither humour nor the over-50s are seen all that often in dance, but it isn't tokenism which makes dance insiders turn out in delighted force for choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion: it's the knowledge that Burrows and Fargion's shows are one of the surest bets in dance for an evening that will be original, funny and clever in equal measure.

I didn't get time to cast an eye on the incredibly brief programme note before the lights dimmed for One Flute Note (2012). Instead, I took everything I saw at face value, and interpreted it as an brilliantly deadpan pastiche of high-concept, inscrutable contemporary performance art. Dressed in utterly conventional jeans, shirts and boots (Burrows is actually wearing precisely the same outfit as a techie who helps set up the stage between pieces) they look like a couple of dads, and stand on stage with a kind of deliberately unassuming slouch, staring deadpan at a point behind the audience and commanding – in slightly Estuarial accents that only reinforce the dad impression – a whole series of musical effects, from the titular single flute note to "strange singing", "tubular bells", and "45 foghorns". These appear randomly, and sometimes with comments from a capricious disembodied voice, as if Burrows and Fargion are in their own version of Duck Amuck, the classic Daffy Duck cartoon in which he gets into a fight with the animator who's drawing him. Fargion in particular wears a brilliant expression while listening hopefully for the flutes and foghorns he's ordered, as if he's following a rather tense but ultimately disappointing bit of cricket on the radio.

Burrows makes his hands dance with grace and inventivenessThe haphazard build-up of sound reminded me of the kind of avant-garde composition that accompanies contemporary dance, but Burrows and Fargion could be parodying any number of musical styles which rely on a built-by-numbers layering of stock elements – there's a Broadway-style emotive climax for example, slushy strings, "beautiful chords" and all. After a while, "gestures" are added to the mix, mostly performed by Burrows, who peers through his glasses with magnificently comic seriousness as he offers a series of circling elbow and hand movements, augemented with the odd clenched fist. It has the flavour of club-dancing (big fish, small fish, cardboard box) slowed down and mixed with the portentous attitude of "deep" contemporary dance, and further gentle fun is poked at the latter when both performers start walking around, still po-faced, carrying a pair of chairs which they pass to each other (shades of Pina Bausch). What's it all about? The programme says memory, but it could just as well be parody, or formalism, Burrows and Fargion indulging themselves in creating form and having a gentle laugh at those of us in the audience desperately seeking content.

If One Flute Note is in some sense about dance pieces that have nothing to say, the second piece of the evening, Body Not Fit for Purpose (2014), is about those that have too much to say. Sitting at a table with microphones for all the world like a pair of local radio presenters, Burrows and Fargion introduce each segment of the piece with a title, which accumulate to make the piece's political direction clear – "George W Bush", "Fear of Immigrants", "Arab-Israeli Conflict". For each segment, Fargion strums a little folk guitar and Burrows does more "gestures", a term which belittles the grace and inventiveness with which he makes his hands dance, at once elegant and mildly hilarious. Strongly resembling sign language, the gestures seem to have definite meanings, yet we can't actually read their content, an obvious comment on what the programme calls "the uselessness of dancing to express anything of any real concern".

They send us on our way with consciences prickedBut Burrows and Fargion don't give up on the attempt; not only can we feel a justified anger and sadness about world affairs behind the humour (in the segment on special interrogation techniques both music and gestures have a mournful, accusatory violence), but they use the whole piece to bring their concerns closer to home, gently skewering the artistic-political pretension of the kind of people who come to see niche performance art at Sadler's Wells, as if watching a show by an "artist, 54, happy to help gentrify your city (no pension at all)", wishing that you "lived a simple life in a community of loving people with low carbon emissions", and being angry at "those whose neoliberal policies have allowed them to inherit the earth" is somehow the same as actually protesting.

The brilliance of the Burrows/Fargion act lies in its delicate balance: it's both clever and serious, but also silly and funny. They keep the audience in a quiet ripple of continual, smiling merriment for an hour (which is as good for the soul as a yoga class, a session down the allotment or whatever other simple-life pleasures the righteous middle-class dance watcher might indulge in), but send us on our way with consciences pricked, egos gently deflated, and admiration for Burrows and Fargion themselves as buoyant as ever.

• Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion perform the same bill tonight, 3 February, at the Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler's Wells