A by-the-numbers romantic comedy

There’s nothing new in “What’s Your Number?’’ It’s that awkward, tedious monster mash of “chick flick’’ and romantic comedy - a flatulent issue of Glamour in a Hildy Johnson hat. What it does confirm is that neither genre is an easy home for the lunatic skills of Anna Faris, a comedian whose address is somewhere on Planet Farce.

It’s not that you don’t want to see her fall in love. It’s that you don’t want to see her fall in love in what’s basically a Katherine Heigl movie by another name. (That’s how barren the romantic-comic universe is: “a Katherine Heigl movie’’ actually means something.)

In any case, Faris applies her not-that-dumb-blonde stylings to the story of Ally, a freshly fired Boston woman who learns from Harvard or Marie Claire that if she exceeds her 20-sex-partner ceiling, something awful might befall her pelvic floor. Or something like that. She vows to dig around among her exes and one-night-stands for a suitable life mate. Her having been recently fired only gives her extra time to, say, travel to Washington where one old boyfriend (Anthony Mackie) asks for her hand in marriage so that they can conquer the Beltway with him as closeted homosexual and her as his beard. That, of course, is the movie we should be paying to see - a sexy black gay guy and a pratfall-prone platinum blonde climbing the political ladder.

But the movie isn’t that ambitious. It looked for a moment as if Ally would join Nicki Minaj and Jenna Maroney of “30 Rock’’ as one of the few women in popular culture right now who aren’t afraid of or embarrassed by their sexuality. But Ally opts for recycling old sex into new love, which in the movies is a sort of moral alchemy that in life never works.