Comedy is a matter of taste and preference — it’s a deeply personal thing. Which makes it hard for a critic to give a blanket assessment of a specific kind of comedy, especially if it didn’t work for them, but clearly worked for others (the laughter or lack thereof is the indication). “It’s not funny,” the critic says, “well I had fun,” someone else can reply, and then we’re at an impasse.

Which is the dilemma one finds oneself in with “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass,” a very strange and shaggy Hollywood satire of sorts from David Wain and The State crew, still riding the goodwill of “Wet Hot American Summer” after all these years. If only this were as funny.

"Gail Daughtry" lives in the same world as that iconic summer camp spoof, as well as Wain’s 2014 rom-com parody, “They Came Together,” in that he’s playing with genre convention and expectation, taking well-known norms to the goofiest extremes. But those films hewed more closely to their respective genres, while "Gail Daughtry" is totally scattered, combining crime and spy movie tropes with a fish-out-of-water comedy and a Hollywood send-up. It has far too many ideas for its own good, and yet no ideas that are good enough to sustain this bizarre curio of a comedy.

What’s ironic is that one of the problems driving this wacky plot forward is the characters have to come up with a movie idea to pitch to star Jon Hamm (playing himself of course), leading them to do some pretty inane and shockingly violent things. It’s almost as if Wain and co-writer and co-star Ken Marino had no idea for a movie, then baked their search for an idea into their script, and then turned it into a madcap adventure about a woman on a quest to have sex with Jon Hamm. What an ouroboros!

OK, about the sex quest. Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) is a chipper hairdresser from Kansas born without the part of the brain that recognizes sarcasm or irony. She’s a cheerful, Pollyanna-ish naïf whose literal-mindedness is almost as extreme as Amelia Bedelia. Her childhood sweetheart and fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) is the same. She tells him about the concept of the “celebrity sex pass” as a joke, and he promptly boinks Jennifer Aniston at local book reading.

(Nitpicky aside: why didn’t they use the common nomenclature “hall pass”? Is it copyrighted? “Celebrity sex pass” is clunky and sounds like an off-brand version of the well-known slang.)

That infidelity crisis is how Gail ends up in Los Angeles determined to bang Hamm, collecting a motley crew of similarly clueless helpers along the way. There’s her best friend Otto (Miles Guttierez-Riley), her salon bestie; Caleb (Ben Wang), an overly ambitious intern at Creative Artists Agency; Vince (Marino), a screenwriter turned paparazzo with a heart of gold; and John Slattery, as John Slattery, down on his luck. An accidental briefcase swap has a pair of thugs on their tail, in a forgettable and underdeveloped B-plot.

With a parade of celebrity cameos and collaborators in bit parts, "Gail Daughtry" at times feels like an excuse for Wain and co. to make something at home with all of their friends. Fair enough, it’s great to see all these people employed, but what about what we’re watching? Behold, the Los Angeles of the middle-aged working comedian: the CAA lobby, the Chateau Marmont, Griffith Park, etc. And the plot is as half-baked as the pitch they present to Hamm.

What’s actually interesting about this comedy is the distinct streak of despair and even resentment that reveals itself at the climax, a feeling of helplessness and uselessness. Everyone’s been striving to make it in this crazy town: the intern, the actor, the paparazzo. But not even Jon Hamm can help them get a movie made; even he feels inherently powerless. There’s an unexplored anxiety vibrating there that feels the most thematically fruitful, about what it means, some 25 years after bursting onto the scene with a generation-defining comedy, about maintaining the work, the drive, a sense of purpose, after years of strikes, and in the face of a constricting industry. Do they still have it? Is the dream still alive?

Maybe that’s why Wain and Marino need to invent a dreamer stand-in with Gail, a guileless eternal optimist who knows nothing of the craven Los Angeles and accepts everything at face value (though she is filled with a scary bit of rage too). She might behave like she has a head injury, but she’s going to achieve her goal, dammit. “Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass” might not be as funny as “Wet Hot American Summer” (for this critic), but reframed, it serves as a fascinating status update on life in La La Land for this troupe.

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'GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS'

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for sexual content, violence/bloody images and language)

Running time: 1:33

How to watch: In theaters July 10

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