Snark is delicate. There are few things more asinine than clumsy or stilted snark, and even clever snark can feel cheap and mean-spirited. The new comedy “Date Night” puts together two of our best snarkists, Tina Fey and Steve Carell, and lets them play around. This is a good thing. Even better, the screenplay by Josh Klausner gives Fey and Carell genuinely appealing characters to play around with—Claire and Phil Foster, a nice but somewhat bored couple from suburban New Jersey. The Fosters’ cute, college-educated snark is about all they have to keep themselves sane, and it may not be enough, especially when they discover that their equally affluent and snarky friends, Brad and Haley, are getting a divorce. The real distress with which funny Claire and Phil react to their friends’ casual decision to end their marriage suggests something important about snark: that it is not always about simple cynicism or mockery, but often about common sense and even morality. Snark is delicate because it is judgment.

But things get really interesting when the movie starts judging the Fosters’ judgments. The comedy-of-errors plot, which involves the Fosters being mistaken for a couple involved in criminal activities (played by Mila Kunis and James Franco) and chased around New York City, is as trite as they come, but the movie mostly takes it as a pretext to plunge the comfortable middle-class Fosters into panic and to mock their snarky elitism. There is a memorable scene of Carell’s wry, always-amused tax advisor vomiting nervously onto the sidewalk. When the Fosters seek refuge in the apartment of a shirtless, tech-savvy Mark Wahlberg, an Israeli girl with whom he has apparently been having sex asks him in halting English, “are we having sex with them?” The Fosters laugh hysterically while she continues talking to Wahlberg in Israeli, “I am glad we are not having sex with them; they look old and weak.” The Fosters laugh and laugh.

Yet the movie also loves the Fosters and their condescending suburban reasonableness, and it tends to contrast them favorably with the antics of Crazy City Dwellers. When the Fosters confront the couple they’ve been mistaken for and Carell tries, pathetically, to be a menacing badass, the couple mocks him to shreds—but then we get a scene of the enemy couple talking like adolescents in unnecessarily specific (i.e. “funny”) detail about their sex lives (with the Fosters reacting wryly). This scene feels kind of ugly. A better scene of this type comes at the climax of the film, when the Fosters are forced to infiltrate a putrid strip club (“This is end-times shit,” remarks Fey) and get in the good graces of an extremely sleazy district attorney (William Fichtner) by pole-dancing for him. Fey and Carell do a bunch of silly “sexy dances,” which is amusing, but the scene works because of the attorney’s visible sexual excitement at the silliness, performed by Fichtner without a trace of snark to make us feel less queasy. Maybe the boring sex life of the Fosters isn’t so terrible after all…

As usual with this kind of comedy, we conclude with a sort of family-values lesson—husband and wife have learned to appreciate one another more, to listen, to trust, etc.—and, also as usual, the family values stuff doesn’t entirely harmonize with the snark that has come before. The two get closer than usual here, though; thanks to the charm of the lead actors and their appealingly-written characters, we can almost feel the snark and the warm fuzzies cuddling.