YMMV / A Futile and Stupid Gesture

• Funny Moments: Considering it's a biopic about one of the most influential humor magazines of all time, this is a given.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The film has plenty of awareness that Doug was a difficult person, but it also wants the audience to invest in him as a person and feel sympathy for him. He's shown to have had many friends, but beyond the fact that he was funny and fun to party with, it never establishes why so many people liked him. Instead, the film portrays a successful, Harvard-educated man who is given to bouts of depression, is unfaithful to his wife and girlfriends, is openly misogynistic, has serious substance abuse issues, a major chip on his shoulder and alienates nearly everyone who cares about him. Watching him spiral into cocaine addiction and die in a possible suicide is a bummer, but it's hard to actually sympathize with him, even when they reveal that his older brother died young and he is traumatized by it.