“Adventureland” is a by-the-numbers romance about New York City grad-school love emerging from the idealized, corndog stench of two months working at a carnival midway in Pittsburgh. Nothing worse than eighth-grade broken hearts happens to the cool, beautiful characters and you can plot the whole trajectory of their happy ending at the opening credits (“music by Yo La Tengo”).

With a half-asleep Kristen Stewart and Michael Cera-knockoff Jesse Eisenberg, the movie would be innocuous enough, except for the thesis, stated painfully by Martin Starr, playing an actual working class kid with not enough money to move on (he’s a supporting character): “We are doing the work of pathetic, lazy morons.” You know how in school, some bully would headlock someone smaller and get him to “admit” he thought his sister was sexy? That’s what kind of dark “admission” this is — the kind that gives the cute, leading actors permission to disdain this “pathetic” world and spend the movie rolling their eyes, making out and sneaking rum and beer and pot cookies.

Since his days as the geekiest geek on “Freaks and Geeks,” Starr’s become handsomely underappreciated but still able to righteously diss a drunk, lonely bimbo if she tells him she’s really into sci fi … but especially dragons (dragons are fantasy pap). This happens in the far-better 2009 production “Party Down,” a show airing on the Starz channel and on instant watch through Netflix.

You could easily call “Party Down,” a scripted comedy about actors and writers trying to pay the bills with catering jobs, a “recession comedy” because it fits a certain world view where if you’re not on a bullet train to the success you want, the world must be really going nuts! (Like, if monsters of fertility and reality show trash can make a killing on the endcaps of every supermarket line, what the hell’s stopping you?) And some would probably call “Adventureland” that genre too.

But “Adventureland” pretends a summer of half-assed effort among the reptilian families who squeal at foam-filled pandas and The Zipper is suffering enough to earn a life mincing from grad-school cocktail parties in exposed-brick pre-wars in Manhattan to bi-monthly trips chilling in Sofia and Puerto Natales. Its attitude is as bad as the tittering laughter of mall girls stopping in a grim Goodwill to fashion Halloween costumes from the rack where someone’s looking for a respectable interview suit. Its spirit is as rotten as every hipster renting on the “bad” side of town, discarding usable sneakers on the electrical wires and carousing until dawn because they don’t have to work in the morning.

You want “recession comedy”? Read the New York Times and Washington Post articles about how the $300,000 a year crowd are literally having to shop at Costco and eat at home and then go an extra week between highlights — in last season’s Infiniti crossover, no less. “Recession comedy” is a term for those who feel queasy when their dividends drop a few quarters, those who downsize their vacations to “Vogue“‘s specifications. Guess what? The tough times aren’t about them.

“Adventureland” is slumming among those with credit lines fat as rat tails, those who really are the weak.

Like “Spaced” before it, “Party Down” is a much-needed antidote and what makes it rare is the ability to portray the usually debasing struggle for success without an air of “been there, escaped that!” superiority (Toby Young, I’m looking at you). It is a screaming, healthy, reassuring reminder that earning less than six figures doesn’t make you a loser — it makes you 90 percent of the country.