Nate (Jemaine Clement) is a one time successful playwright now struggling to finish anything he starts. To add to his problems his wife is leaving him and his lease has run out. Worse, the only person is he can turn to for a bed is his father Bob (Elliot Gould), who lives in a gated retirement community.
Nate's despair isn't helped by his dad's insistence on telling jokes (usually shaggy dog stories about a Jew called Zimmerman) no matter the circumstances, and Bob's insistence that he do something to deserve his keep. A failure at mundane jobs, he finds himself drawn into helping a group of elderly women trying to put on The Mikado. Meanwhile everyone seems to be trying to help, or hinder him, and he finds an ally in Allison (the excellent Ingrid Michaelson), like Nate driven to staying with a parent by life's vicissitudes.
This is very much a movie intended to appeal to those looking for happy endings, so it's not too much of a spoiler to say that everyone lives happily ever after, despite the bumps in the road. It does illustrate the power of humour to both heal and irritate, and how some people will use it as their defensive shell against the world, but this isn't a movie that repays much analysis. Within those limitations it's a lot of fun, often very funny, and if you're looking for something easy and unthreatening then this is probably one of the best of the genre. But I can't help having some liking for a film that delivers comic scene based on Gilbert and Sullivan. And that gives us a chance to see the wonderful Bebe Neuwirth, albeit in a brief cameo role, showing she can be as dry as ever.
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