The joke’s on who?

The comedy crew that did Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and Waiting for Guffman is back with a spoof of the movie business.

Once again, their targets are a set of characters who revel in their own clichéd superficiality. This time, however, the resulting menagerie of clever parodies is sometimes overtaken by clichés of its own.

The basic premise has a nice cutting edge to it: The “buzz” of rumor and manufactured hype sets off a mini-epidemic of “Oscar fever” among the actors filming an absurdly pretentious little family melodrama called Home for Purim (it’s “Southern” and “Jewish,” at least to begin with …).

Director/writer/co-star Christopher Guest’s regulars—Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy (who also co-wrote), Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, Fred Willard, etc.—all have a hand in it, and the spoofing extends out from actors and crew to nearly every other aspect of the movie business—producers, PR types, technicians and the full range of TV talk shows and film chat.

There are at least two dozen characters of note in all this, which means that most of them are spread pretty thin. Nevertheless, several of the single-note caricatures are especially good—Ed Begley Jr. as a fatuous make-up artist, Levy as an elaborately ineffectual agent, Jane Lynch as a preening talk-show host, Bob Balaban and Michael McKean as a nitwit screenwriting team. And John Michael Higgins is brilliant as a farcically self-absorbed PR guy.

But the crucial role is Marilyn Hack (O’Hara), the convulsively vain actress who contracts the story’s first and foremost case of Oscar-madness. O’Hara’s spectacularly grotesque performance goes beyond funny and into a nasty sort of pathos somewhere on the far side of parody. And with her in particular, the film eventually loses its comic momentum and subsides into a nearly savage brand of satire.

Similarly, the increasingly frozen smile of Marilyn Hack’s co-star (Shearer) bespeaks hilarity morphing into something like a death rattle. Fred Willard augmenting his trademark cluelessness with a funny haircut seems a bad sign as well.

Maybe it’s part of the point that we end up choking a bit on the laughter. There is, after all, something a little smug and self-congratulatory about movie-TV spoofs of the movies and TV. Before we get too comfortable with the in-jokes and the inside stories, we’d probably do well to consider just how much of the joke might also be on us.