Review: ‘This Isn’t Funny’ lacks chemistry too

With a title that obligingly provides its own capsule review, “This Isn’t Funny” is a would-be rom-com that comes up seriously short on the laughs.

Meet Eliot (Katie Page), an anxiety-ridden, obsessive-compulsive stand-up comic who works out regularly at the L.A. club Fais Do-Do.

Meet Jamie (Paul Ashton), an Australian juice-bar manager who meets Eliot when his bicycle unceremoniously meets the front of her car.

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Despite an initially hostile start, the two embark on a thoroughly uninteresting, tediously self-absorbed relationship, interspersed “Seinfeld” style with bits of black-and-white live performance footage somewhat relating to their trials and tribulations.

Directed by Ashton and written by Ashton with Page and ostensibly inspired by their own off-screen relationship, this first feature is populated by blandly underdeveloped main characters who tend to recite their lines rather than inhabit them.

The likes of Anthony LaPaglia and Mimi Rogers manage to mine a bit more humor from what ought to have been a much more fertile landscape, but it’s stand-up comics Beth Stelling and Ahmed Bharoocha who prove substantially more amusing — not to mention affable — as Eliot’s Fais Do-Do cohorts.

Had it been primarily their story, this might have been a lot funnier.

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“This Isn’t Funny”

MPAA rating: None.

Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.

Playing: Los Feliz 3, Los Angeles.