With his new talking-heads doc about standup, director Kevin Pollak is trying to prove that Misery Loves Comedy. In fact, he proves that cinema loves editing – and is bereft without it. As has been written elsewhere, it’s not a good movie: flabby and directionless, it spends a long time talking to a lot of comics (60, apparently) to establish not very much about the comedian’s craft. Why, you’ll scream, am I watching Jim Jefferies talk about parenting, or Chris Hardwick telling us he once masturbated in a church? Standup can meander like this and – at a stretch – get away with it. Documentaries, not so much.

But what I found most frustrating was the premise itself. This isn’t a film that, as you might hope, seeks to interrogate and undermine tears-of-a-clown cliches. Instead, it swallows those cliches whole, and seeks not to challenge but to reinforce them. Pollak’s assumption is that comedians are a breed apart, a special type of people. And the film explores what kind of people they are. The ideas that a) comedian isn’t an identity, it’s a job, or that b) writing and performing comedy isn’t the same thing as being a funny person, don’t seem to occur to the director. Even when his interviewees humbly contradict his thesis (Lisa Kudrow: “I think every actor is capable of being funny, I really do”), Pollak looks away.

It dies hard, this idea of the tortured comic, probably because it seems to ennoble what might otherwise seem a trivial art form. It presents comedians as afflicted geniuses, wrestling their demons to the floor for our entertainment. For the audience, maybe it obligingly offsets our envy of comedians, gifted as they seem to be with great senses of humour, a stage to themselves, status and celebrity. And – of course – there are plenty of examples to fuel the cliche. The film is dedicated to one of them, Robin Williams. There are plenty of comics – Doug Stanhope, Jerry Sadowitz, Liam Williams – whose comedy springs to some degree from the difficulties they have negotiating life off stage.

But, as one or two of Pollak’s interviewees point out, the same can be said of other artists – and the same difficulties are experienced by non-artists, too. There may have been a time when comedy did attract a high proportion of depressives or social misfits. But now, when it’s a major branch of the entertainment industry, when it offers clear paths to fame and fortune – and indeed when it’s a broader-than-ever church accommodating a vast range of styles and worldviews – that’s no longer necessarily the case. Plenty of people are making comedy not because they have to but because they choose to. And to do so, they’re not deploying their innate funniness, far less following the logic of their deep-seated psychological compulsions. They’re just working hard, acquiring professional skills and putting them into practice.

One of the smartest comments on this subject was made last year by the not noticeably miserable Sara Pascoe, responding to research proposing that (to quote the headline) “Successful comedians display symptoms of psychosis”. “Everyone I know who is really, really good at comedy,” wrote Pascoe, “works really, really hard. It’s a job that normal people do. And I think it’s unhelpful for anyone to believe there is magic involved in being an artist.”

That would have made a more novel and radical thesis for Pollak’s movie, and repeatedly, it’s within his grasp. But, endlessly distracted by another chummy anecdote and in thrall to the mythology of comedians’ specialness, he lets it slip through his fingers and disappear from view entirely.

Three to see

Gein’s Family Giftshop
The inheritors of Late Night Gimp Fight’s mantle as the go-to act for smutty and macabre sketch comedy, the Foster’s award-nominated trio bring their sophomore show to Soho for a week’s run.

Soho theatre, London, 29 September-3 Oct. Box office: 020-7478 0100.

David O’Doherty
A national tour begins for ex-Perrier champ O’Doherty, purveyor of man-childish, keyboard-centric whimsy to his adoring fanbase. This year’s offering, fresh from Edinburgh, rejoices in the title We Are All in the Gutter, But Some of Us Are Looking at David O’Doherty.

Medina Theatre, Isle of Wight, 1 October. Box office: 01983 823884. Then touring.

Frisky and Mannish
More party comedy from the cabaret double act, on whose musical flair and (in Laura Corcoran/Frisky’s case) killer voice you can always rely even if the jokes dry up. In this revival of their 2014 show, Just Too Much, pastiches and pisstakes are promised of pop acts “from Miley Cyrus to Sinéad O’Connor via Lorde and Clean Bandit”.

Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth, 27 September. Box office: 023-9286 3911. Sage, Gateshead, 29 September. Box office: 0191-443 4661. Then touring.