“Leon, the Pig Farmer” is a good-natured British ethnic comedy, done in a broad-mannered, Thames sitcom turn, hampered by a weak script and uneven pacing. The Jew/Gentile jokes that make up the bulk of the film wear out their welcome fast and the film becomes a bore rather than a pig.

The film concerns Leon Geller (Mark Frankel), who discovers himself to be a by-product of artificial insemination. As if that weren’t enough, he finds to his shock that, due to a snafu at the insemination center, his Jewish father was not the donor but, instead, a gentile pig farmer by the name of Brian Chadwick (Brian Glover). When Leon travels to Yorkshire to visit his new father, Chadwick is so overjoyed at seeing him that he permits Leon to help out on the farm. Leon mistakenly injecting sheep sperm into a pig, finds himself to be the midwife to a living and breathing kosher pig.

The sheer looniness of the film’s premise is exhilarating, but the film meanders in Leon’s London digs for an interminable length of time, dwelling upon stereotypical Jewish jokes so hoary that they must have seemed old hat to Shecky Green’s grandmother. It is only when Leon ventures to the Yorkshire pig farm that the film generates a farcical head of steam. Brian Glover and Connie Booth glow with a rich comedic sense and they chomp down on the premise and run with it. Their sense of the sublimely ridiculous is a welcome relief from the pop-eyed mugging seen up to that point and Glover and Booth trot away with the film.

The production, direction, and writing credentials are traded off like the old Laurel and Hardy hat bit among Gary Sinyor, Vadim Jean, and Michael Norman, leading one to suspect that “Leon, the Pig Farmer” suffers from too many creative minds hopping aboard a rickety chassis. What with the loose-limbed structure, sluggard editing, and disjointed screenplay, the film’s sole triumph is one of gentile faceurs than the production team. At least with an old “When You’re in Love, the Whole World’s Jewish” album, you can always flip to the other side of the record.