Foreclosure, divorce, the economy and the workplace may not sound like the building blocks of a riotous comedy.

But as filmmaker Steven Conrad points out, just because you're trying to make people laugh doesn't mean you can't sneak in a little drama, too. In The Promotion, the directorial debut of the screenwriter of The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happyness, Conrad incorporates all of the less-than-amusing subjects above -- and still manages to be funny.

''I watched Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd movies like crazy when I was growing up, because my dad was a silent movie fan,'' says Conrad, 39, a Fort Lauderdale native, over a quickly inhaled lunch at Lincoln Road's Sushi Samba. ``Those movies were set in the real world and showed people needing food because they were hungry. But they were still funny.''

In the silent era, there weren't yet enough movies for audiences to think in terms of genre, so filmmakers made whatever kind of movie they wanted, combining sadness, beauty and comedy within the same film.

But today's demographics-driven, audience-tested Hollywood films tend to stick to one particular tone. ''There's a push from studios not to confuse the issue too much, because audience test scores prove their appetites have become very compartmentalized,'' Conrad says. ``And I get that. When you go to a dinner party and someone is walking around with a tray of appetizers, you always ask what it is before you eat it. You don't want to eat something without knowing what it is, because then you can't get ready for it. It helps to have a menu.''

Neither audiences nor distributor Paramount Pictures had a menu for 2005's The Weather Man, the first in an unconnected (and purely accidental) trilogy of films written by Conrad about men struggling to strike a balance between family and career. That movie, which starred Nicolas Cage as a Chicago TV weatherman contemplating a job offer that would move him away from his estranged kids and ex-wife, proved to be too dark and melancholy for moviegoers who bought a ticket for the wacky comedy its misleading marketing campaign promised.

Conrad fared better with his script for 2007's The Pursuit of Happyness, which was written as a straight-ahead drama that drew on Will Smith's charisma to inject humor into the fact-based story of a penniless single father struggling to raise his son and pursue his career aspirations.

With The Promotion,Conrad seems to have honed the perfect balance between laughs and pathos. The film centers on the growing rivalry that develops between Doug (Seann William Scott) and Richard (John C. Reilly), two assistant managers at a Chicago supermarket vying for the same manager's spot at a new store scheduled to open in the neighborhood.

Although Conrad says the three films were never intended as a trilogy, he also recognizes the similarities in their subject matter. ''It's all I write about now -- how hard it is to come by success, how it challenges us, what weaknesses it draws out of us to compete,'' he says. ``Mostly it's about having been unemployed and having had trouble finding work after becoming a father. Before I wrote The Weather Man and Pursuit, I was writing stories about things we want, not things we need. I found that difference to be elemental for me.''

The supermarket in The Promotion is a rich source of humor for Conrad, who mines sights and situations familiar to anyone who has ever set foot inside a Publix: The punks who loiter in the parking lot making trouble, the guy who ''samples'' products then sneaks them back onto the shelf, the row of 8x10 smiling portraits of the staff that greets customers when they enter the store.

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