Given the current craze for politically incorrect jokesters such as Sarah Silverman and Sacha Baron Cohen, it’s almost surprising that mainstream stand-ups haven’t turned en masse to Holocaust humor. It’s an easy and tested shortcut to controversy (Google it, please). Add “Holocaust” to any mundane routine and the new compound zings with scandal and irreverence. Tova Reich is so taken with the catalytic properties of the H-word in her new novel, “My Holocaust” (HarperCollins, 326 pages, $24.95) — a satire about interest groups fighting for commercial and political control of Holocaust memories — that she overuses it to the point of hilarious and disturbing abstraction.

A visitor to a concentration camp simulation signs a guestbook with the line “Thank you for making the Holocaust possible”; second-generation American Jews are diagnosed with “Holocaust envy”; and a character who stages a forceful takeover of the American Holocaust Memorial Museum on behalf of a coalition of underappreciated Holocausts — the Children’s Holocaust, the Gay and Lesbian Holocaust, the Christian Holocaust, among others — insists that “all Holocausts are unique.”

Pungent platitudes aside, the Holocaust in the novel is preeminently fashionable, and cashing in on the trend big-time are our remorseless protagonists, Maurice Messer, chairman of the Holocaust Museum, and his son Norman, co-founder of “Holocaust Connections Inc.” For a certain fee, father and son will supply you and your cause with some major Shoah cred — linking say, your anti-fur organization with the hair shorn from massacred Jews. Never before has it been so profitable to be a victim.

Pity then, that a novel with such an irresistible premise falters stupendously at the level of form: Swathes of it are bogged down by toothless narration. For a comedy, there is surprisingly little action and a lot — no, an excess — of gazing and recalling. So much so that the refreshing novelty of an unabashed farce populated by characters severely lacking in conscience, humanity, and depth is quickly ruined by Ms. Reich’s desire to tell us in gossip-column detail what her beloved buffoons are thinking at any given moment. The exposition that ensues is clumsy and stilted; every line of dialogue is buffeted by paragraphs of boring vacillation; the puppets are pirouetted too slowly to come to life. Worse, even the vaguely plausible puppets — Norman, for instance, on a touching quest to meet his now-Catholic daughter living in the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz-Birkenau — are chucked aside so we can entertain the endless ramblings of secondary characters.

The secondary characters — dumb American peaceniks and deniers — end up stealing the show. The reader emerges from the book overwhelmed not by Shoah one-liners and scathing observations about Holocaust merchandisers, but rather an encyclopedia-worth of hackneyed, farcical descriptions of American culture that lend nothing to the novel. One reads on in wonder: Why drag us 4,915 miles from the Jewish enclave of Washington, D. C., to the Aryan berserk of Auschwitz — where Maurice is trying to recruit a new donor — to make fun of the American obsession with therapy and the naïve stupidity of pot-smoking hippies trying to universalize the Holocaust? These could well belong to any other novel, as in fact they do: This is the quirky America of George Saunders imitators.

As “My Holocaust” progresses, these spiritual Zen-Buddhist-Samsara types, who are camped out in Auschwitz doing what hippies apparently do best — smoking pot, being pregnant, and playing strumming acoustic guitars while their wheelchair-bound leader chants about spiritual hunger and tofu schnitzels — become increasingly vocal and power hungry, setting their sights on the American Holocaust Museum itself. Funny enough, but also a convenient choice for a writer such as Ms. Reich, who revels in grotesque physical descriptions (two contemptible characters “put on the weight of about a medium-sized goat” between them by the end of the novel). Is the novelistic Holocaust under threat from these people specifically because they’re so easy to skewer? Is reverting to New Age comedy simply Ms. Reich’s way of sidestepping more dangerous Holocaust humor?

Some may argue that, in not going further — in not exploring the psyches of her Jewish characters except superficially — Ms. Reich is only exercising natural restraint, that she deserves credit simply for the risk of satirizing lobbies that oversell their victimhood. And indeed some credit is due. To purposefully set out to make the Holocaust feel abstract is clever and brash. To reduce it as a joke with a feeble punchline, however, is just lazy. We are supposed to laugh at the slapstick irony of lines such as “We’re going to the gas chamber! The limo is waiting by the door,” and “A concentration camp blesses you with concentration,” but the premise is never further complicated into uncomfortable absurdity. Nothing is at stake; the exploitation and overexposure of the atrocity never feel dangerous.

Thus, the shock of encountering characters who toss around the Holocaust like a rhetorical beach ball quickly vanishes, replaced by the very sort of indifference that Ms. Reich is preaching against. This indifference, of course, is hugely problematic. In an article for Harper’s in 2004, Thomas de Zengotita argued, by means of a thought-experiment, that perhaps the only way to make the Holocaust unforgettable for children would be to block all representations (no schmaltzy movies, no tear jerking books, no TV miniseries) till they reached a certain age and to then give them unfettered access to a grand Holocaust archive for a week. The sudden realization of the massacre, he suggested, would be unforgettable, traumatic, and scarring.

Living in an information-saturated society, we’ll never be able to confirm his hypothesis, but coming to Ms. Reich’s novel is like stepping into a vault of previously unpublished Holocaust humor. It’s too bad, then, that despite its bravery, the humor in “My Holocaust” is neither scarring nor, in the scheme of things, memorably offensive.

Mr. Mahajan is a writer living in Brooklyn. His first novel, “Family Planning,” will be published by HarperCollins next year.