Kelly Stables, left, and Alyssa Milano play single sisters.  By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Little girls sketch their wedding dresses in crayon, and couples in their 90s still tell the story of how they met, which suggests that there is an appetite for romance even among those most removed from its sway.

Kids in summer camp learn scriptwriting in comedy workshops, and retired network executives in assisted-living communities still call up old colleagues to pitch new ideas, so it’s not as if there is a shortage of creative people willing to write television comedy.

It cannot even be said that the romantic comedy is a lost art form. After a long drought that followed the end of “Friends,” the last few years have fostered a renaissance of network sitcoms — “The Office,” “30 Rock” and “Parks and Recreation” on NBC; “How I Met Your Mother” and “The Big Bang Theory” on CBS; and, most recently “Modern Family,” which began in the fall on ABC and is already one of the best new comedies in a long time.

So it’s tough to understand what happened to “Romantically Challenged,” an ABC sitcom that begins on Monday, with a title that is almost too apt. This show, about four single friends who have difficulty finding mates, has a hard time making a joke of the inherently laughable process of dating.

The humor is secondhand and stale — one-liners about being gay and sleeping around — and made all the more painful by the waves of canned laughter that wash up and crash against all-too-familiar sets, like a bachelor pad, living room and coffeehouse.

Inexperience is not the problem. James Burrows is the show’s director and one of the executive producers, and his work spans “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Gary Unmarried.” The casting isn’t at fault either. Alyssa Milano (“Charmed”) plays Rebecca, a divorced mother who hasn’t been on a date in 15 years, and Ms. Milano is surprisingly at ease in the comic role of a beautiful woman with no confidence. Kelly Stables, who is often cast and always funny as a deadpan neurotic, is Rebecca’s sister, Lisa, an advocate for heedless promiscuity. Kyle Bornheimer, who proved he can do better in the short-lived but inventive comedy “Worst Week,” plays Perry, a successful financial planner who is hopeless at love. Josh Lawson is plausible as Shawn, an aspiring fiction writer who sponges off Perry.

In the premiere episode Lisa persuades Rebecca to have her first one-night stand, and Shawn decides to seek a job. The writing does not rise to the plot’s lack of occasion.

“Friends” was such an outsize success that the knockoffs that work best are those that take the most liberties with the original premise and setting. Even Courteney Cox, who played Monica on “Friends,” is trying to develop a fresh comic persona as the sexually deprived heroine of “Cougar Town,” a barbed comedy about single life but one that pivots on older women dating younger men.

“Romantically Challenged” is not nearly as ambitious: it’s about four friends instead of six who gather in a Pittsburgh coffee shop rather than Central Perk in New York. The actors don’t have much comic chemistry, and the dialogue has none of the quick wit or the inventiveness of “Friends.”

“Romantically Challenged” is comically challenged, and while that is puzzling, it’s not intriguing at all.

ROMANTICALLY CHALLENGED

ABC, Monday nights at 9:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 8:30, Central time.