Even if you’ve never heard about Noah Baumbach’s adjacent (and superior) film, Humor Me still suffers from being overly familiar and tidy. Hoffman has some experience shooting CBS’ Madame Secretary and his film appears to carry that network’s house style. The film barely registers at meaningfully exploring its father (Elliot Guild as Bob) and son (Jemaine Clement as Nate) dynamic and saves all of the messy details that could have made this story interesting for its final 20 minutes. Humor Me also deserves credit for simply giving actors of a certain age substantial screen time. Elliot Gould isn’t asked to do a whole lot but deliver Hoffman’s precious knee slappers while doing a cliché old guy, but he manages to make Bob memorable. Annie Potts of Ghostbusters fame pops up in a fun minor role, but it’s Priscilla Lopez as Bob’s new girlfriend Connie that left the biggest impression on me. Out of all of Humor Me’s characters, Connie felt the least like a sketch. The movie is so thin though that if I suggest you even the vaguest specifics on the plot, you could probably imagine how most of action that plays out on the screen. Jemaine Clement is as solid as he is in all of his work, but can’t manage to hide his New Zealand accent for longer than a couple seconds at a time. Maria Dizza and singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, in her first film role, also co-star as Nate’s soon-to-be ex-wife and love interest, respectively, but are written as such stock types that they aren’t able to shine. Clement and Michaelson’s scenes are the clunkiest in the film, so formulaic and cheesy that even the finest thespians would sound uninspired.