"Best in Show"

As in "Spinal Tap" and "Guffman," much of each actor's role was improvised around Guest and Levy's bare-bones script; it's rare to find such a large group so wholly in sync. Guest and his gang prefer jokes that ricochet: Sometimes their lines swing around and hit their mark, one delectable half-beat later; other times they escape into the ozone, hapless dust motes with no real mission. But even the free-floating jokes that fail to hit home contribute to the picture's overall vibe: No joke ever feels wasted. There's an admirable economy to "Best in Show," an understanding that the best comedy isn't just a string of gags but a picture that fills itself out gradually and completely, with plenty of laughs tucked in along the way.

So even though Posey, as a shallow lawyer besotted with the J. Crew lifestyle, may not have one particularly memorable funny line, her character, built from carefully layered and multihued strata of neuroses, becomes brain-rattlingly funny by the end of the picture. Levy plays a mild-mannered and well-meaning suburban hubby whose character has, literally, two left feet. (We see them shod in matching lefty Hush Puppies.) But it's his face, with those black-mink caterpillar eyebrows and willfully protruding front teeth, that makes his feet seem so funny.

When McKean points out with scolding good humor that his boyfriend, Higgins, has packed six kimonos for a 48-hour trip, Higgins corrects the shortfall by tossing in two more. (Higgins and McKean play their characters as obvious stereotypes but without a trace of the mincing meanness you often see in characterizations of gay men, and the affection their characters feel for each other is palpable.)

Even the peripheral characters feel like essential parts of the whole. Balaban, as Theodore W. Millbank III, president of the Mayflower Kennel Club, has a brief but hilarious bit that sneaks up on you: He makes you lean forward ever more carefully to listen to his spiel about the significance of his organization before you realize that it's dissolving into senseless dog-babble. And Fred Willard, as the addled, motormouthed dog-show commentator who doesn't have the faintest idea what he's talking about, carries his preposterous dada patter to a genius level: By the time he'd compared a disgraced and disqualified dog to Shoeless Joe Jackson, I'd officially lost it.

Through it all, it's easy to see how Guest sets the tone with his performance as Harlan Pepper, the bloodhound owner. When we first see Harlan, he's poring over a map of a local lake with two buddies from his fly-fishing store (in Pine Nut, N.C.) -- the three of them are discussing the merits of taping the appropriate fly to different areas of the fishing ground and selling the maps to tourists. It seems like a prime setup to make fun of the hicks, a conduit for jokes to make "sophisticated" viewers feel superior to the backwoods crackers.

But once Harlan gets talking about his pup, Hubert, affectionately massaging the dog's voluminous folds of skin as he sings his praises, you realize Guest's intention is exactly the opposite. Harlan is immensely likable but not uproariously funny: For "dog," he says "dowg," but there's music, not derision, in the word. As he and Hubert make the big drive to the dog show, Harlan amuses himself by softly singing Hank Williams' "Honky Tonkin'" -- to foolish and uneducated ears, it's just a song that a dumb hick would sing, but to anybody with half a brain and a modicum of good taste, it's a number inextricably entwined with pop-music royalty.

Guest is a very funny actor, but he's an astonishingly graceful one, too -- you can see it in the way he invests everything he has into even a relatively small character. When Harlan leads Hubert in front of the judges, Guest's body language conveys his character's nervousness and intense concentration. Harlan's regal and stiff-backed trot represents formality, determination and a dignity that can't be undone by the light-colored socks he's wearing with his dress slacks.

Guest doesn't make a mockery of Harlan, but he doesn't invite bathos or misguided sympathy, either, an approach that's symbolic of his conscientious good humor as a filmmaker. With "Best in Show," Guest revels in the eccentricities of dog lovers everywhere, but there's kindness at his core. He's a mensch among mutts.

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