The Comedy

A.V. CLUB

Rick Alverson November 8, 2012

“Williamsburg represent,” Tim Heidecker halfheartedly declares to a bar full of African-American patrons in The Comedy. “Represent what?” one of them replies. And there, in a nutshell, lies the thesis of Rick Alverson’s prickly examination/example of disaffected Brooklyn hipsterdom, and the towering fortress of irony and cock jokes that wall up access to the soul—if one even exists anymore. Like an arted-up twist on provocative anti-comedies like Lars von Trier’s The Idiots or Tom Green’s Freddie Got Fingered, The Comedyis deliberately off-putting, offering a hero who wallows in booze and entitlement, and gets thin pleasure from needling people by defending Hitler (“if you take murder out of the equation…”) or slipping into the voice of a Southern plantation owner. There’s genuine pain at the core of Heidecker’s character—or at least a numbness where the pain used to reside—but the film is keen on obscuring it.

An early scene sets the tone: Sitting morosely by a hospital bed, facing the certainty of his father’s death and the uncertainty of where his life will go afterward, Heidecker snacks on cookies and scotch, and peppers a male nurse with questions. Has he ever had to deal with a prolapsed anus, when the muscle gives out from abuse and hangs down in a tissue sac? Was he taught about that along with the women in nurse school? The formalities of Heidecker’s father’s considerable estate come up throughout The Comedy—and more subtly, the emotional fallout does too—but elsewhere, Heidecker talks nonsense with his buddies (including his Tim & Eric partner Eric Wareheim, Gregg Turkington a.k.a. Neil Hamburger, and LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy) and provokes people for sport. Sometimes he’s actively trying to hurt somebody, other times he’s just pushing the limits, like an overgrown child.

The Comedy harshly assesses a particular breed of drifting, decadent, trust-funded Brooklyn layabout, but not from a safe distance—it implicates itself, and feels more like an act of raw self-loathing than cool portraiture. Heidecker’s performance is absolutely pitiless, inviting no sympathy, yet suggesting some faint embers of humanity under the surface, some private agony that cannot be salved by his relationship to other human beings. It’s a nasty piece of work, to be sure—John Waters once considered audience members vomiting during his movies to be like a standing ovation, and that seems to apply here—but it’s melancholy as well as abrasive, with a moody tone that buffs out some of the in-your-face obnoxiousness and cruelty. Its audience may be self-selective in the extreme, but few films have better articulated the limits of irony as a force field against the world.

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INDIEWIRE

Christopher Bell November 8, 2012

“Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie” and Rick Alverson’s “The Comedy” (starring Tim Heidecker) both played at the Sundance Film Festival, and it’d be easy to simply peg the former as your standard bizarre T&E affair and the latter as a dramatic arthouse effort. But that’s simply much too reductive for Alverson’s current character study, a film uniquely weird in its own right and filled with enough of the duo’s humor to make their followers happy — to a point. The director uses comedy to explore a man’s inability to be a human being as he constantly involves himself in situations purely for irony’s sake, refusing to take others’ lives into consideration. There was much, much talk about how unlikable Charlize Theron was in “Young Adult,” but as far as this writer’s concerned, she has nothing on Heidecker’s Swanson. It’s a difficult film in that sense, one that incites laughter but immediately questions the intent (and point) of the characters’ catalytic behavior. Occasionally feeling like the work of John Cassavetes, a la “A Woman Under the Influence” (not to put anyone off — the Cassavetes comparison has been so abused in the past few years by American directors that it apparently only means filming people talking), Alverson’s latest may be be a tough sit given its subject and attitude, but his expert hand and intelligent nature creates a worthwhile, singular experience.

As his wealthy father lay in an unresponsive state within their lavish home, Swanson ignores the reality of the situation by wasting the days hanging out with the likes of Eric Warheim and James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem himself). The nurturing atmosphere is Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood comprised of different ethnic groups but mostly consisting of your run-of-the-mill, butt-of-the-joke hipster culture. Swanson and his buds waste the days by playing wiffle ball, riding bikes, harassing a cabby that refuses to put on hip-hop music, and acting like mental patients at house parties. By himself, our protagonist’s motives are more mysterious — at one point, he comes upon a few immigrant landscapers and immediately inserts himself into the work, removing his shirt to get down ‘n dirty. When the homeowner swings by, Heidecker pretends to be the boss, confessing that his men continuously talk about the nearby pool and uncomfortably insists that they be allowed to take a dip. The estate’s owner agrees without much of a fight, causing Swanson to immediately drop the act and leave. This strange action begets a pattern, from pretending to be a sales rep at a furniture flea market to actually getting a low-paying gig as a dishwasher in one of the thousand eateries in Brooklyn. Part of it is the character hoping to get a rise out of people, failing, and briefly realizing his futile act — but it also charts his slow, admittedly resistant progression towards some sort of normal lifestyle. Cleaning an endless assortment of coffee mugs and dinner plates, Swanson is sarcastic when interacting with a waitress (Kate Lyn Sheil), but it still seems like his subconscious is trying to direct him onto the right path.

But the stern joker is unable to participate in anything earnestly, and as his father’s health deteriorates even further, his sister-in-law attempts to wrangle him into taking some sort of control of his life with the onset of their incoming inheritance. Alverson constantly assembles scenes with the potential for redemption but never forces his characters into it — the path is clearly visible but unfortunately not on the agenda for Swanson. In that sense things don’t wrap up neatly, there is no lesson learned nor is there at all a direct, sympathetic connection between the audience and Heidecker. Though the emotional attachment to our movie-leads is something we all automatically crave (hell, it’s been ingrained into us by cinema for decades), the director instead portrays a man long off the rails, where even the most pressing life circumstances fail to ignite any maturity. “The Comedy” is not a tale of morality, it’s a tragedy.

Alverson keeps the camera close, meticulously following all movement as if searching for a crack in the ego’s shell. When the director does frame wide, he captures the very small world of Williamsburg in all its youngster glory — going even wider, the Manhattan skyscrapers lurk overhead, the real world beckoning. Somehow, they’re able to ignore it. Combined with an eerie score, these moments are oddly startling and quite effective, conveying an enormous amount of feeling in a simple way. Heidecker is quite perfect for the role, obviously funny but also a very compelling lead, giving the film’s quieter moments an immense strength. His look not only suggests regret for his conduct, but also admits to a sort of weakness — can he really not handle these situations? Or is it that his desire to be an antagonistic clown greatly outweigh the urge to do the right thing? His crazier moments pull from Gena Rowlands rather than from the ballistics of his television program.

The film comes to a close with one last shot at Swanson’s redemption. As we look back on Alverson’s piercing critique of extended adolescence and rejection of obligation, one wonders why the hijinks of the characters were never met with any proper comeuppance, especially considering the amount of scenes in which Heidecker fucks with one or more people. A later scene involving a taxi driver involves some verbal retaliation, certainly something of substance, but it doesn’t exactly do the trick. What we draw from this moment is that his family considers him helpless and useless, while strangers don’t see him being worth any of the trouble. Fitting punishment, if a bit too subtle to be picked up on.

“The Comedy” sees the director working with bigger names but still retaining his sensibilities. We don’t have to mention that hipster culture is the new whipping boy (apparently we’re hipsters for liking Pixar) and Alverson could’ve easily fired at the surface, gathering plaudits for being topical. Instead he digs up something that affects more people than just Brooklynites, the lack of sincerity in our lives and this generation’s reluctance of commitment. It’s a meaty film, filled with ideas unobscured by any generic narrative string, a move that shows not only the confidence of the director but his respect of the audience. This is one that’ll have people talking.

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FILM.COM

William Goss November 5, 2012

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim have already unsurprisingly brought their cult favorite TV show to the big screen this year with the shrill, surreal “Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie,” but less expected is their involvement in Rick Alverson’s equally uncomfortable character study, “The Comedy.”

Despite the pasty revelry of its opening moments, this is more of a one-man show, with Heidecker taking the lead as Swanson, a layabout Williamsburg 30-something whose life is literally adrift on a yacht in the East River when he isn’t carousing with friends (including Wareheim and LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy) or confronting strangers. Swanson has a lot of free money, a lot of free time, an ailing father, an incarcerated brother, a fed-up sister-in-law and a primary interest in keeping the world at a jokey remove in his every social interaction.

Coming off as something like “Five Easy Pieces” for the hipster set, “The Comedy” reveals itself to be more of a tragedy about entitlement and self-loathing, a seemingly sincere movie about a deeply ironic and unfulfilled man as he belongs to a culture — hell, maybe even an entire generation — terrified of sincerity. (Even the film’s own title can be seen as an apt touch of irony at the expense of the “Tim & Eric” fanbase.) He pretends to work as a gardener to no avail before getting a job as a dishwasher that he doesn’t need. He harasses some cab drivers for not turning on the radio while bribing others to let him take the wheel for a night. He walks into a bar full of black men and casually offers to gentrify the place with the help of his own shades-and-shorts crew.

The only people with whom our beer-swilling, bile-spewing anti-hero would appear to get along are hospitalized strangers who can’t respond to his pranky presence at their bedside and kids who aren’t bothered by his insistence on always goofing around. When it comes to behaving around adults, though, Swanson doesn’t hesitate to forgo proper protocol and indulge in deadpan rants about the considerable merits of Hitler’s politics and the likely cleanliness of hobo genitals, a character trait that Heidecker sells without fail. “Billion Dollar Movie” sought to provoke by filling bathtubs with literal excrement; director/co-writer Alverson (“New Jerusalem”) is more prone to having Swanson fill conversations with it instead.

The film is in turn filled with conversations and confrontations like these as it meanders about, looking for trouble much as Swanson himself is, an aimlessness alleviated only by the slight promise of an oddball romance with an equally vulgar waitress (Kate Lyn Sheil). Like his lead, Alverson just wants people to care, even if that subsequent emotion takes on the form of hate, and as such, “The Comedy” has my begrudging respect.

“The Comedy” is currently available On Demand and will open in select cities starting November 9th.

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THE NEW YORK POST

Kyle Smith November 16, 2012

Picture “Raging Bull” with a sleazy prep from the Brooklyn hipsteropolis of Williamsburg, and you’ll get the idea of “The Comedy,” a character study that tries to make the revolting compelling.

A fully committed Tim Heidecker plays Swanson, an entitled, rude, potbellied slacker who stands to inherit a massive fortune when his father, who is hospitalized and near death, slips away. In the meantime Swanson floats around on a boat in the East River, does some blue-collar slumming à la Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces” and harangues everyone near him with filthy monologues about whatever seems least appropriate at the moment. Here he is professing admiration for Hitler; there he goes telling a waitress he’s a convicted rapist.

Swinish as this character is, his gonzo alienation can be funny in the way of an outlaw comic as you await his next outrage against all decency. But Heidecker is no Nicholson, and the character lacks the magnetism of a true antihero. Moreover, the film’s hints that Swanson’s problem is mere sadness at the passing of Daddy seem facile.

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THE VILLAGE VOICE

Karina Longworth November 7, 2012

Could there be a more unsympathetic character in today’s culture than a well-born white male who uses his privilege irresponsibly? A highly improvised fictional exposé in search of the elusive heart and soul of hipster nihilism, The Comedy stars alt-comic superstar Tim Heidecker as Swanson, a trust fund 35-year-old hanging out in Williamsburg, fucking around, and waiting for his sickly dad to die.

The title is ironic, or maybe “ironic”—the film, writer-director Rick Alverson‘s third feature, is basically a shock drama. Its sensibility is kind of a hybrid of the awkward conceptualism associated with Heidecker and co-star Eric Wareheim (TV’s Tim and Eric) and the brand of another of the film’s players, James Murphy, figurehead of blue chip hipster auto-criticsLCD Soundsystem. Where Murphy is known for dance tracks with lyrics that witheringly dismantle the pretensions of the audience most likely to dance to them, Alverson’s film takes the form of a kind of glacially paced, shaky-cam art project that the Brooklyn dude-bros it depicts might bike over the bridge to catch at IFC Center—if for no other reason than to tell chicks they’ve seen it.

Heidecker makes a much more convincing 21st-century Arthur than Russell Brand. Chubby, bearded, beer-soaked, bedecked in novelty sunglasses and shorts, Swanson lives on a boat—because he’s floating, get it?—and runs with a crew of dudes also defiantly unkempt. None of them are apparently married or seriously employed, and they have nothing better to do than to approach life as a starting point for a real-world version of improv comedy. Cab drivers are repeatedly fucked with. Swanson defends Hitler mid-flirtation, and the girl still goes home with him. The gang takes an ironic field trip to a church, followed by dive bar whiskeys. Swanson evolves from pretending to be part of a landscaping crew in order to mess with entitled homeowners to actually slumming it as a dishwasher; from blithely snacking on scotch and cookies while a male nurse attends to his sick dad to showing some glimmer of a desire to feel for the infirm.

Alverson has big ambitions: His statement in the film’s press notes describes his protagonists as “an inevitable byproduct of the utopian dream come to fruition, ignorant or oblivious to the precarious state of world affairs, the economic uncertainty of their own country and the stagnation of the culture in which they live.” I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a failure that those ideas are barely gleanable from what’s actually on screen. There’s not a false note in the film, but maybe there’s a difference between accuracy and truth. Certainly you can’t accuse The Comedy of pandering to its audience, sentimentalizing its character study or even editorializing on top of it. That ultra-cool, matter-of-fact address is maybe the best way to speak to the knee-jerk indifference of its audience in this moment—the movie’s analysis of Swanson and friends’ behavior is essentially the cinematic equivalent of a Listicle Without Commentary on the Awl. But I wonder if decades from now, The Comedy might function as a sincere snapshot—its intended satire might be too dry, too implied, to survive the passage of time.

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THE NEW YORKER

Richard Brody 2012

Tim Heidecker (of Tim and Eric) is front and center in Rick Alverson’s aptly titled movie, playing the role of Swanson, a hapless hipster—an idle thirty-five-year-old Brooklyn heir whose obscene wealth gives rise to obscene talk, attitudes, and behavior. The comedy in question is that of life itself—not just Swanson’s own but that of the friends, family, and unfortunate accessories to his singular existence, be it the male nurse who cares for his comatose father, the cabbie whose vehicle he wants to drive, or the woman who has a seizure on his yacht. This is, in effect, “Arthur” meets “Jackass”; Swanson attempts ever odder and uglier provocations to jolt himself from a permafrost ennui and enter something like real life, for which (as he discovers when he takes a job as a dishwasher) he’s utterly unprepared. Lurching through the city like Don Rickles on acid, he and his cronies spew a spectacular flow of id-riddled chatter and obliviously dish out harder knocks than those they go trawling for. The shock factor is tempered by the loopy pathos that Heidecker and Alverson find in the character; it’s hard to hate Swanson more than he hates himself.

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VARIETY

Justin Chang

For a catalog of aggressively stupid, socially deviant male behavior, Rick Alverson’s cheekily titled “The Comedy” is not without a certain subversive intelligence. A dark, determinedly abrasive study of a slovenly Brooklyn hipster who spends his abundant free time harassing cab drivers, disrupting churches and assaulting everyone he meets with discomfiting sexual and racial language, this singular Sundance entry is certain to split reactions every which way; for some, the film’s critical view of its subject may not be enough to compensate for the displeasure of his company. Fans of star-comedian Tim Heidecker notwithstanding, post-fest commercial prospects look slight.

A memorably repulsive prologue depicts a bunch of guys carousing in and out of their underwear, sloshing their chubby, pasty-white bodies with beer. But this is no fraternity hazing ritual: Well into their 30s, these emotionally deadened man-child pranksters are overgrown in every sense, leading lives of such undeserved privilege that they can afford to regard the world with sniggering indifference to social niceties or human struggle. Masters of squirm-inducing comic cruelty, they perform for each other, for the unsuspecting strangers unfortunate enough to cross their path and, of course, for the viewer.

The film spends a plot-free 94 minutes following one of the men, Swanson (Heidecker), as he wanders around Williamsburg and other parts of New York, stirring up all manner of minor chaos. Addressing a nurse assigned to take care of his wealthy, bedridden father, Swanson delivers a badgering monologue about lower bodily functions. Getting into a political discussion with a girl (Alexia Rasmussen) at a party, he extols the virtues of feudalism and compliments Hitler. Somehow she winds up in bed with him on his houseboat, to which he brings the occasional date, ferrying her across the bay in his dinghy.

Some of Swanson’s stunts — such as when he poses as a gardener and asks a well-to-do couple if his Mexican buddies can swim in their pool — carry unsettling racial overtones, though they project not outright prejudice so much as an impish child’s unformed view of the world outside his bubble. Elsewhere, he and his friends get together for the equivalent of comedy writers’ roundtable sessions, holding extended mock conversations on inane and vulgar topics, and occasionally asserting their love for one another in voices tinged with sarcasm.

Given his surreally unhinged antics with funnyman partner Eric Wareheim (cast as one of Swanson’s bearded buddies) on their Comedy Central series or their concurrent Sundance premiere, “Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie,” Heidecker seems almost subdued here. Onscreen nearly every minute and often wearing thick-rimmed blue sunglasses, the thesp gives a compulsively fascinating performance replete with weird facial tics, vocal inflections and gestures. There are moments throughout, including the ambiguous final scene, that suggest Swanson is beginning to experience a flicker of empathy. But any confirmation of this is firmly withheld by the script (by Alverson, Robert Donne and Colm O’Leary), as are any telling details about Swanson’s background apart from his obviously wealthy family.

A level of monotony does creep in, and unreceptive viewers may well argue that to devote a feature-length movie to these sorry specimens of humanity, even in a harshly evaluative light, is to give them far too much credit. In scrutinizing so specific and pernicious a subsect of American culture, Alverson can hardly be said to be getting at universal truths, although some may well recognize, with a wince, the characters’ impulse to respond to the distant suffering of others with an insensitive one-liner. Pointedly, the focus is so entirely on the protagonist that one gets only the vaguest sense of his victims’ humiliation; scene by scene, the film sets up its joke and leaves it to us to recoil from the punchline — even, or perhaps especially, when it’s genuinely funny.

Alverson’s unfussy filmmaking breathes quiet assurance, as Mark Schwartzbard’s HD lensing and a deftly underplayed synth score (by Alverson and Champ Bennett) invite the viewer into a contemplative state. Mumblecore regular Kate Lyn Sheil has a brief, effective role as a waitress in whom Swanson might just have found his match, at one point taking their puerile performance art to an inexplicable extreme.

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SLANT

Joseph Jon Lanthier November 4, 2012

The barrel-gutted, foul-mouthed protagonist of Rick Alverson’s The Comedy is Swanson (Tim Heidecker), a filthy rich man-child who spends most of his workless hours floating on a small yacht in New York Harbor. He makes occasional trips ashore to prank gleefully through Brooklyn’s most gentrified neighborhoods with aging friends (Eric Wareheim among them), or to imbibe malt liquor at his comatose father’s bedside, or to seduce hipster ingénues with his putatively racist and misogynist deadpan. One may wonder what more a porky thirtysomething could ask for. Yet Swanson has become so starved for mutually invested attention that he’s taken to hurling himself impishly through the world in search of emotional candor at any price.

No middle-class sanctuary escapes his pealing adolescence: He trades surreal dick jokes over brunch and sullies church pews with clownish tomfoolery. He delights in “touring” proletariat vocations such as gardening and cab-driving whenever the whim to do so strikes, then retreats back into safety of jerky needling after the gambits bore him. (He suspiciously infiltrates a posh backyard, for example, posing as a landscaper and begging untowardly for a swim in the stunned homeowner’s pool.) But from the get-go, this insolent kidding is understood as a ridiculously handicapped attempt at shattering social estrangement with insult and trickery, presumably so that any resultant raw nerves can be converted into a brief bond of sorts.

When his hideous routines fail to disarm their target audiences, Swanson is left begging for reactions before stoic faces. He launches butt joke after butt joke toward his father’s unamused male nurse, punctuating each with a request for acknowledgement: “Famous Anus Cookies…anything there?” Later, he stalls the discussion of sober family matters with his sister-in-law (Liza Kate) with a Southern-drawled bit about upholstering furniture with “slave penises and slave vagina.” “You know that was funny,” he pleads as she grimaces. And Swanson is funny, not only because of the frantic creativity behind his transgressions, but also because of his cockeyed commitment to negotiating attention with them. The abrasive gags he and his friends commit are less intended for self-amusement than for continual proof that they exist. However shameful it is to be uncomfortably dismissed by one’s peers, anger and rejection just barely qualify as human contact.

There’s little more to the movie than these increasingly existential antics, and yet Swanson’s angst undoubtedly appropriates the meta-narrative of choice for many American independent films of the last five years about post-graduate, pre-career adults—stories wherein disenchanted hipsters find a piece of themselves by pushing against the expectations of their environment. Swanson’s socioeconomic privilege is not unlike that of Lena Dunham’s wayward youths, and he confuses recklessness with growth as do the anxiously aging femmes in Miranda July’s The Future and Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz. PBR cans and erstwhile LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy make mostly atmospheric cameos here as in Noah Baumbach’sGreenberg, which also portrayed gray-haired hip-sarcasm. The Comedy‘s painfully superficial male relationships furthermore recall those of Kelly’s Reichardt’s films, with the slow-mo, testicular groping of an opening beer wrestling sequence inverting Old Joy‘s frighteningly intimate boy-on-boy back massage. Both scenes imply that haptic closeness pays few emotional dividends between friends when their conversation remains mechanical and repetitive.

Swanson’s debt to other filmic traditions has been cited elsewhere: The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody pithily describes The Comedy as “Arthur meets Jackass,” a fair approximation of sketch-like moments wherein the character circumvents his stifling wealth by moonlighting as a dishwasher. The sense in which Swanson rubs up against the limitations of his counter-cultural zeitgeist, however, may link him more aggressively to Richard Lester’s Petulia. That movie explored the menacing side not only of social revolution circa 1968, which manifests itself as everything from promiscuity to playing a euphonium for the hell of it, but of the same era’s zany film-grammatical conventions as well. (Several dizzying party scenes and a shuffled timeline preclude comprehension of the basic plot.) Alverson and Heidecker similarly approach the various rings of hipster-dom hell with the intention of spoofing the milieu’s insularity and its compromised epiphanic potential. Is Miranda July’s human sculptural stretchy-shirt dance to a bombinating Beach House song in The Future any less self-indulgent than the way Swanson rents a bewildered cabbie’s taxi for 20 minutes, then abandons him with an angered pedestrian?

The title character of Petulia is a post-hippie who never quite experiences the swinging ’60s without the fear of male domination; Swanson is a post-hipster who never experiences irony without desire. And so the pampered, porcine prankster has awkwardly made irony an expression of his desire. Every scatological gag is an intimate strategy; every racist remark is a repressed need escaping him like a sour gas. And our emotional response to his behavior is, likewise, necessarily alloyed. Swanson does not amuse us in spite of the pity he inspires but because of it. Since laughter is one of the few forms of sympathy he can absorb, we can’t help but gratify him, even if its ultimate deliquescence implies ambiguous doom.

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THE BOSTON GLOBE

Wesley Morris December 6, 2012

In the opening shot, Heidecker is drunk and partying with his buddies — including Eric Wareheim, Heidecker’s partner in sketch drollery; the comedian Gregg Turkington; and the musician James Murphy, who recently stopped being LCD Soundsystem. They jam their crotches into each other, but it’s not sexual because nothing about these men is sexual. It’s a moment that does indicate that Alverson wants to say something. An hour and a half later he hasn’t said it. The movie, which is set mostly in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., is a critique of white-guy privilege, of Williamsburg’s hipsterism, of how men conduct themselves in comedies.

It operates in exactly the opposite way so-called bromances do. It’s as self-conscious as parts of “Knocked Up” and “21 Jump Street,” and as preoccupied with excretion and secretion as those movies’ peers. But it’s sucked dry of rambunctiousness. The jokes are desiccated, too. Alverson is working in a state of suspended irony. What’s he after is more specific than what hangs on the Judd Apatow family tree.

Heidecker leaves his family’s mansion, pads around the block, until he happens upon some men landscaping a yard. When the owners wander by, he says something to them in loose Spanish about his men wanting to use the pool. He’s assumed the role of the boss, and after one of the owners acquiesces to the pool, his work is done, and it’s off to the next stunt, unfashionable social position (feudalism could have really worked, Hitler actually did somegood, he argues), or harassment (“Why don’t you guys have satellite radio in these cabs,’’ he yells at one taxi driver). It’s off to drink near skeptical black strangers in a bar (“I’m trying to be honest with you, and you all up in my griiiiill”). It’s off to his boat.

The lonely provocateur Heidecker plays is named Swanson, which gets at the presumed ritziness Alverson is after. Swanson is 35, he takes menial jobs — or plays at them — because he can imagine nothing else for himself. He sits at the bedside of his (symbolically) dying father and mocks his male nurse. The closest Swanson comes to sexual affection is passively watching the woman he’s lured to his boat have a seizure.

Again, none of this is necessarily funny. That’s the extent of the irony here. Yet the film evokes so many comedians whose schticks would be peers of Swanson’s — Russell Brand, Zach Galifianakis, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Nick Swardson, the men of so-called mumblecore movies and “Jackass,” Sacha Baron Cohen — and distills their lunacy all the way down to self-negating leisure-class dada.

There’s no filmmaking to enable the amusements the way Richard Lester’s did with the Beatles or Jean Luc-Godard’s can do with almost anything. “The Comedy” thrives on unalloyed contradiction: unfunny funniness, innocent guilt, self-conscious obliviousness, feel-good racism.

But what it doesn’t achieve is transcendence, the way, say, “Holy Motors,” Leos Carax’s current, similarly arbitrary adventure in personae, does. Lena Dunham’s “Girls” is another version of what Alverson is doing with “The Comedy.” The younger women on her HBO show are as self-obsessed as the men in this movie. But “Girls” is simultaneously funny and mortifying and true. It’s also guided by the distinct sensibility of a woman with a vision. Dunham perceives the assorted laws of the wider world and can mine comedy from the failure to both abide by and transgress them. Alverson might be thinking as big as Dunham is, but his movie feels smaller.

Swanson’s preoccupation with feces and semen befits a man whose life is as flaccid and constipated as his. At some point, he finds himself drifting around a swimming pool, and it’s tempting to think of Dustin Hoffman sinking to the bottom of the deep end in “The Graduate.” But there’s a difference. Swanson’s pool is empty.

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