A misanthropic dentist, a roguish ghost and a zany Egyptologist: as these unlikely companions scamper around Manhattan in the buoyant comedy “Ghost Town,” they resurrect the spirits of classic movie curmudgeons like W. C. Fields and such romantic comedians as Cary Grant and Carole Lombard in Woody Allen territory.

It would be easy to make too much of this froth, directed by David Koepp (screenwriter of Spielberg blockbusters) from a script he wrote with John Kamps. A latter-day hybrid of “Topper” and “Blithe Spirit” and a visual ode to autumn in New York, “Ghost Town” is a screwball comedy with no big surprises or hidden metaphors. But if you comb through the ranks of recent Hollywood comedies that have tried to conjure the same mood of airy amusement, most of what you’ll find are strained, witless duds that get mired in sentimentality like flies in molasses.

As it draws to a close, “Ghost Town” tiptoes to the edge of that sticky mess, but it doesn’t get caught there. Its snappy dialogue and sharp comic timing, and the offbeat chemistry of Ricky Gervais (in his first feature-film starring role), Greg Kinnear and Téa Leoni, keep it afloat.

The dentist, Bertram Pincus (Mr. Gervais), is a grumpy transplanted Briton who declares that he doesn’t mind crowds, just the people in them, and shuts up his yammering patients by stuffing dental equipment in their mouths. Bertram is extremely annoyed when, after a seven-minute near-death experience during a routine colonoscopy, he suddenly finds himself a middleman between the living and the dead.

On leaving the hospital he is besieged by anxious ghosts whom only he can see and hear. Trailing him around Manhattan, they pester him to take care of their unfinished business; only then can they happily disappear into the hereafter. As the living overhear him talking to the dead, the usual crossed signals and misunderstandings land him in trouble, but the movie doesn’t overdo it.

Mr. Gervais gives Bertram many of the same comic tics he brought to David Brent in “The Office” and Andy Millman in “Extras”: a stammering befuddlement that is simultaneously verbose and nonsensical; sickly smiles and joyless laughs in which his mirth curdles with self-doubt; a tongue-tied staccato; and his special mixture of clueless grandiosity, insensitivity and stifled humiliation.

Among the ghosts the most persistent noodge is Frank Herlihy (Mr. Kinnear), a slick yuppie go-getter with a cheating heart who in an early scene is struck by a bus while running away from a falling air-conditioner. Frank entreats Bertram to prevent his widow, Gwen (Ms. Leoni), from marrying Richard (Billy Campbell), a human-rights lawyer he believes is after her money, although the evidence he offers is flimsy. Gwen happens to live in the same Upper East Side apartment building as Bertram, and they have crossed paths many times. With each encounter Bertram has been monumentally rude, so befriending her is no easy task.

Mr. Kinnear, now that he has some lines on his face, is no longer a Ken doll exuding boyish naïveté. His genial martini-drinking charmer with a wandering eye and a raised brow is about as close as anyone has come in a recent movie to Cary Grant, who starred in the original “Topper” in 1937.

Most amusing of all is Ms. Leoni’s eccentric Egyptologist. Equally enamored of her enormous dog, which knocks her over now and again and whose odor triggers Bertram’s gag reflex, and a priceless mummy that is a centerpiece of a major exhibition she is putting together, Gwen solicits Bertram to conduct a professional examination of the mummy’s mouth.

Like Lombard’s and Jean Arthur’s plucky madcaps, Ms. Leoni’s Gwen is a gal who keeps a tight rein on her feelings. Crisp and self-reliant, she is all the more attractive for her apparent lack of interest in beauty, fashion and wedding bells. If the semiromantic connection she develops with Bertram (he’s smitten; she is interested but wary) isn’t totally convincing, theirs is a classic screwball relationship of sassy, openhearted combat. As Frank nags Bertram, and Bertram woos Gwen in his ridiculous way, the pace of mush-free repartee rarely flags.