Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone. Half-laugh, half-cry, and you join a long line of stories that aim to shake up the audience with quirky angles on weighty subjects.

This approach gave us, for instance, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the 2004 sci-fi fantasia of love and forgetting that married the whimsy of the director Michel Gondry and the pathos of Jim Carrey. At their best, the conflicting forces of mirth and grief have a kind of multiplier effect, like warm and cold air fronts whipping up a thunderstorm of catharsis.

Execute the strategy less well, and it’s more like turning side-by-side hot and cold taps on and off, scalding and shocking, over and over.

“Kidding,” the new collaboration between Mr. Gondry and Mr. Carrey, in a Showtime series created by Dave Holstein, begins promising the first kind of story but often delivers the second.