“Date Night” naturally goes for that “date night” audience. You’re sitting in the dark during the four hours a week you’ve scheduled to go out with your significant other, hoping that dressing up, not having to cook, wearing perfume, catching a new flick and going out for an overpriced, underpoured margarita will provide the social

lubrication to refresh your love for one another once you crawl in bed that night. That’s the premise of the evening for the movie’s main characters, in any case, though the date night has become its own routine of potato skins and salmon in business casual for New Jersey couple Phil and Claire Foster (Steve Carell and Tina Fey, still funny despite their overexposure of late).

“This is more moist this week,” Claire says, staring at her food. “Hm,” Phil says. “Mine is more dry.”

The pair have two young children. Their jobs exhaust them with morons — she with homebuyers who want a $1.8 million mansion reduced beyond $320,000, he with tax clients who would rather go kiteboarding than open an IRA with their refund. At home, their friends’ marriage is falling apart, “strangling in the noose of sameness” says the wife, who is thrilled at the prospect of dancing, taking her top off and “getting it on with three guys at the same time.”

Horrified, the Fosters try desperately to cling to their spark, and one date in New York flings them full-on into the furnace. The details of their mistaken identity turned death-defying evening are immaterial, but by the end of it, one gets the feeling their naughty side will be once again contained to imagining semi-dirty conversations and back-stories for the dating couples at the other tables. (“That’s amazing, Jeremy, but I’m going to go home and fart into a shoebox.” “He is a successful financier and she is getting drunk enough to get through what’s going to happen later.” “Because he likes to do weird stuff. He’s going to call her by his mom’s name.”)

That banal squeamishness is nothing unexpected for a comedy written by the guy responsible for the two latest Shrek sequels and director Shawn Levy, the kind of Hollywood cog who exists so that the thousands of people looking for inoffensive date night movies can stumble to the ticket counter and leave their brains occupied by the pressing question of whether they sprayed too much “Axe” (they did). Hence 2003’s “Just Married,” starring Ashton Kucher and the late Brittany Murphy as a wacky couple whose honeymoon turns into a disaster. Or

“Joint Custody,” a 2005 TV movie about a guy who comes home from college to find his sister has turned into a drunk and his parents have split. Or the in-production “How to Talk to Girls,” a movie adaptation of a real-life 9-year-old’s dating manual.

In this limited, compromised framework, every time things get “Adventures in Babysitting” crazy, the movie backs off from danger like a kid whose mom is counting down from three. A shirtless Mark Wahlburg and his half-nude girlfriend invite the Fosters for group sex — and the Fosters admit they’re both attracted to Wahlburg. But Claire would rather talk about how her ultimate fantasy is checking into a cool hotel room, having a sandwich and drinking a Diet Sprite. Not a “gross sex fantasy?” Phil asks, concerned that his wife’s fantasy is about disconnecting from everyone. Later, the Fosters must pretend to be a stripper and her “pimp,” and, in dress-up, the Fosters seem to be actually in love with each other. But every time the movie gets close to confronting the frequent uneasiness of a long-term, monogamous relationship, the common problems, insecurities and jealousies, “Date Night” swerves uncomfortably away from any potential answers or realizations, turning them into cheap punchlines.

Sure, it’s some kind of funny. But farting in a shoe-box is funny too.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.