On “The Daily Show,” especially in Jon Stewart’s early years, correspondents perfected the art of the punk sit-down, in which the interviewees seemed not to realize that the interviewers were mocking them. There’s a mirror image of that dynamic, and it’s on delightful display in “Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words.”

The film, a documentary about this iconoclastic musician and composer, is rich in archival footage that shows Zappa being interviewed by broadcast journalists of all sorts. Most clearly don’t understand his music or his persona, and as they earnestly try to fit him into their Interviewing 101 boxes, he underscores news-media absurdities merely by playing it straight rather than bursting out laughing.

It’s a fantastic collage that the filmmaker, Thorsten Schütte, uses to illuminate not only Zappa (who died of cancer in 1993), but also the cultural upheavals that defined his time. Along the way, we are given an overview of Zappa’s career, from his early albums with the Mothers of Invention through his not particularly accessible classical compositions.

Zappa was an early example of a brand of celebrity in which notoriety overshadowed professional accomplishment. As he himself often acknowledged, he became a symbol of various things for various people merely from his appearance and from what those people projected onto him. Meanwhile, much of his music went unheard, especially in the United States.