Critic Reviews

Explaining humor is usually like boiling water — it evaporates. But the funny folks in actor Kevin Pollak’s well-structured doc can actually break down what they do.

To a person, these comedians are looking for a connection, some attention, and appreciation — which makes them, as Penn Jillette points out toward the end, just like everybody else, only they have microphones and spotlights.

Misery Loves Comedy reveals artists adept at sounding out the darkest depths of our lives — and then transmuting what they find to laughter, a gift I bet sad young poets might ache for.

It's hard to tell if Kevin Pollak's documentary Misery Loves Comedy is too much of a good thing or not enough.

If only he had probed a bit deeper, and widened his scope beyond the predominantly white, male subjects (including our own Rob Brydon, Steve Coogan and Stephen Merchant), this could have been a fascinating film as well as a funny one.

More than anything, Misery Loves Comedy does not need to exist. The niche it aims to fill has already been occupied by people willing to go much deeper than Pollak.

Pollak obviously had fun, but you get the feeling the best bits never made it in.

Misery Loves Comedy, Kevin Pollak’s survey of the opinions of a bunch of professionally funny people, is an evident labor of love and also a work of grating amateurism.

Commingling industry shoptalk with introspective insights and wrangling testimonials, the film casts an incredibly wide net, but doesn't reveal much of anything.