“Dying is easy, comedy is hard” the saying goes. Another bit of conventional wisdom is that comedy is born of misery. That is the case in Funny People for George Simmons, a comedy superstar played by Adam Sandler whose hit movies (Merman, and Re-Do, in which he has the body of an infant but an adult head and mind) call to mind some of Sandler’s lesser movies, not to mention many of those of other alums of Saturday Night Live. Which is to say one wonders why exactly George is such a popular and successful comedian. When he is diagnosed with a fatal blood disease at the beginning of the movie, his comedy routine takes a sharp turn to the macabre. And so Funny People, the third movie directed by Judd Apatow, begins its exploration of the connections between death, suffering, laughter and love. If that doesn’t sound like a recipe for a raucous comedy, it isn’t. Funny People succeeds on the strengths of its personal story, not its jokes or situational humor. While those hit the mark at times, they are not the movie’s backbone.

Apatow gives us a view of funny people that suggests that in their personal lives they are lonely and awkward and not very funny. Their humor comes primarily from mocking their own inadequacies. When George learns his days are numbered, his inadequacies no longer seem so funny to him. His luxurious house is empty, and he has no friends. After a disastrous night at a stand-up club, he hires Ira Wright (Seth Rogan), an aspiring comic whose talents have not yet fully developed, to put it kindly, as a personal assistant and joke writer.

Ira, George tells him, will never be very funny because he comes from the generation of kids whose parents divorced each other, while George came from a generation whose parents stayed together and exacted their misery on their children. As Ira fills the many voids in George’s empty personal life, he grows as a comedian. George, meanwhile, yearns for a life of meaning he never led. This takes him back to his ex-fiancee, Laura (Leslie Mann), now married with children. The movie explores whether George finds himself a lonely, needy, self-centered child because he actively chose the life of the rich celebrity, or if his nature made it impossible for him to make any other choice. Recognizing his mistakes, how easy – or possible – is it for him to correct them? Like the ship of state, the ship of personality and lifestyle is no speedboat and cannot quickly be steered to a new course.

The movie runs a bit long, and that is mostly noticeable when the 500th penis joke rolls around. But on the whole it is successfuly in part because of its length (no pun intended). It is in some ways a movie in two parts – the story of the comedy world, illustrated by denizens of two ends of the spectrum with the successful George and desperate Ira, and on the other hand the story of his attempt at rehabilitation. Apatow wisely doesn’t shortchange either story.