There’s a not-quite-joke going around that starts like this: “Hey, have you seen that Morgan Freeman movie where he’s all wise and godlike?” The next person can add something like, “Is that the one where a beleaguered but winsome Jennifer Aniston finally finds love?” or “How about the one where Jim Carrey makes funny noises and contorts his face a lot?”

Woody Allen, in his 70s, could have his own line in this trope: “Did you see the Woody Allen movie where the nubile, hot young girl flings herself at the aging, misanthropic, well read Jewish guy?”

In “Whatever Works,” suicidal genius nihilist and retired physicist Boris (Larry David) finds himself flung upon by Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), a wide-eyed blonde teenage runaway with nothing to her name but her baton twirler’s letterman jacket.

As the movie’s character field widens (Melody’s estranged, by-the-book Red State parents show up on Boris’s doorstop) and those characters start coupling like meerkats, the movie turns from a simply irritating copy of old Woody Allen movies into a horrifically lazy doppelgänger of “An American Carol.” That movie, a sour and dumb attempt at far right-wing humor (Bill O’Reilly guests as himself, and the main character is a Michael Moore type who wants to outlaw the flag or something) was a long series of cheap shots at Blue States.

“Whatever Works” believes god-fearing Southern women would be happier as godless swingers and gun-toting Southern men are just compensating for their unrequited crushes on their high school football teammates.

Remember that horrid Ellen DeGeneres movie about the search for “Mr. Right”? This is the same thing, just on the other side of the aisle.

Wood is impossibly overmatched by David, a consummate professional whose running commentary on the pointlessness and stupidity of the “failed species” around him is as endlessly entertaining as his HBO smash “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” as long as your humor has the mold-like quality of thriving in darkness. Despite actually being from the land of grits, Wood’s gumbo bimbo is as inauthentic as Splenda-sweetened tea. In comparison, Nicole Parker’s uncanny channeling of Britney Spears, from unjustly defunct MadTV (her recipe for turkey stuffing: “one bag of Funyuns, this much cornets, less than that amount of raisins and then a plop of ice cream and my super-secret ingredient, a spits-worth of glitter!”) is high art.

It’s true that not all men need ever settle down. But at some point, a roving dude — real or fictional — should stop resorting to pick-up lines. If Woody Allen wants to spend quality time with Wood or previous muse Scarlett Johansson or the consummately plucky “Saved By the Bell” cheerleader Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, he doesn’t have to construct a movie to do so, especially if “Whatever Works” is going to be the result.

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