‘); }

Lewis calls Klein one of comedy’s three kings, along with Richard Pryor and George Carlin. For his part, Klein cites two comedy gods, Lenny Bruce and Jonathan Winters, as influences. He got Bruce’s purpose, he says, “to dignify and make more important standup comedy. Talking about something, not just a joke.”

That said, one of his closest friends and mentor was the supreme joke teller, the late Rodney Dangerfield, who was the unofficial emcee for two years at the Improv in Los Angeles. Dangerfield’s daughter says Klein almost became part of the family.

The documentary is hagiographic, but then again, find someone who doesn’t like Robert Klein. His marriage to opera singer Brenda Boozer is mentioned, and while there’s a discussion with Fred Willard about comedy’s roots in pain, we see very little evidence that Klein was ever in much pain.

Fine can’t be faulted for loving his subject. His filmmaking reflects that love, but while he makes an admirable attempt to avoid simple chronology, the film zips from Klein’s youth to present tense and back again with little apparent purpose other than to show, correctly, that the guy has always been smart and always been funny.

Klein’s material has evolved over time, as evidenced by his countless HBO specials, and inevitably, there are a good number of altacocker jokes in his more recent routines and in his quotidian patter. But the drive to tell stories and not just jokes is as potent as ever, and as current.

Did you hear the one about Barack Obama?