Billed as one of Sundance’s sunnier and lighter offerings, the comedy “Cedar Rapids,” which will be distribbed by Fox Searchlight, is a fairly amusing one-joke affair that makes the most of its cast, including a lovable Ed Helms (“The Office,” “The Hangover”) as a dorky Iowa insurance salesman, John C. Reilly as a sex-obsessed middle-aged fratboy and (in a welcome comeback) Anne Heche as a tough-skinned corporate gal much like the Vera Farmiga character in “Up in the Air.”

The one joke is that all of these characters are lame Middle America bozos, especially the Helms figure, who is trying to win a (meaningless to the audience) corporate award for his firm but is such a naif that he has never been on a plane, drinks root beer, is vaguely afraid of black people and men in ponytails, wears Brady Bunch-era sweaters, thinks he is “pre-engaged” to a woman (Sigourney Weaver) who is sleeping with lots of others (and was once his teacher, back when he was 12) and orders “cream sherry” when all the insurance agents are doing shots at the Cedar Rapids hotel where an industry convention has brought them together. His pillow talk includes lines like this: “Making love to you is super, super awesome!”

This is the kind of movie in which someone opens a door and gets the wrong idea when he sees two men talking to each other in their underwear. There is almost no plot; unlike “Election,” it does not manage to make the pursuit of very low stakes (in this case, the corporate award) into high comedy. In the second half, it comes up with a half-hearted ethical dilemma and an uninteresting subplot about the possible sale of an insurance firm.

It isn’t quite mean-spirited — Helms and Reilly like their characters, and so do we — but this kind of de-haut-en-bas satire isn’t my cup of java. Satire should punch at its own weight class or above, and the movie’s implicit message (“Can you believe how dorky these people are?”) is basically the subject of every scene. Still, I laughed a lot at Reilly’s zesty antics, Helms’ bulletproof niceness and weird random touches such as the unexpected comic chops of Isiah Whitlock Jr. — an actor who played a corrupt pol on “The Wire” — whose character keeps saying how he loves “The Wire.” He even does an impression of that show’s villain/hero Omar. Whitlock’s portrayal of a middle-aged Urkel should win him lots of work in comic roles.