As someone who loves to laugh, there’s nothing I enjoy more than a good farce. Dependent on precise craftsmanship, farce sets a number of characters and subplots spinning in opposing directions, moving perilously toward an inevitable collision. In the hands of a skillful writer and director, we become giddy with anticipation as the elements of a social disaster are constructed, set in motion, and sped up. The more complicated the elements and the faster they can be made to race around each other, the more satisfying is the climax. It sounds easier to do than it is, as demonstrated by this new film from director Frank Oz and writer Dean Craig. The setting is a British manor house where relatives gather for a funeral. There are implicit tensions between characters, like the brother who went to America to become a bestselling author and the brother who stayed home to tend to their parents, or the daughter planning to introduce her new boyfriend to her demanding father. Setting the plot in motion is a blackmailing stranger with a secret that must be kept from the family. All well and good. But Death at a Funeral puffs along like a barbecue grill with too little charcoal: When the cook periodically insists on adding more lighter fluid, the only result is a temporary fireball that gives the food an unpleasant taste. A bottle of hallucinogenic narcotics disguised as Valium causes some ridiculous behavior; an elderly invalid has to be helped onto the toilet by his fastidious nephew in a scene that temporarily threatens to launch this into the gross-out territory of a Farrelly Brothers comedy. That impulse doesn’t last, thank God, though it gives a bad taste (literally) to a comedy that might otherwise appeal to undemanding Masterpiece Theater fans for its low-key geniality. The biggest problem with Death at a Funeral is its predictability: The situations that aren’t obvious to the point of being hackneyed (like the antics of the nervous young swain accidentally dosed with drugs) are telegraphed a mile ahead. The able but underemployed cast includes Matthew Macfadyen, Peter Dinklage, Ewan Bremner, Peter Vaughn, Alan Tudyk and Paul McCartney’s one-time fiancé Jane Asher, to whom time has otherwise been kind.