“Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, the characters in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip, have sharp wits. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, the actors who portray those characters, are humorous.

Let me backtrack. In 2006, Winterbottom directed Coogan and Brydon in The Cock and Bull Story, in which the comic pair ostensibly played themselves, in a film that depicted the behind-the-scenes difficulties on the set of a fictional production of Tristram Shandy. It was essentially a metafictional movie about a fictional production of a metafictional novel. That snake is still eating its own tail.