A surprisingly challenging feat for filmmakers is to craft a sequel that succeeds creatively by saying, “Hey, kids, remember the first film? Well, here’s everything you liked about it, except more of it.”

It’s especially difficult to make this formula work with comedy films, because screenwriters too often confuse a) recreating the appealing elements of the first film with b) simply repeating the same gags.

An additional complication comes when there’s a long gap. The original predates an entire trend of similar stories in entertainment media, which can often leave the sequel feeling like its imitators have beat it to the punch, in terms of having anything new to say.

So, “Zombieland: Double Tap” had to avoid the pitfalls of not only “Crocodile Dundee II” and “Ghostbusters II,” but also “Tron: Legacy,” and yet, just like “The Incredibles 2,” it succeeded on all counts.

Just as the release of “The Incredibles” in 2004 predated “Iron Man” kicking off the modern era of superhero films in 2008, so too did the first “Zombieland” in 2009 predate the zombie trend that started with the premiere of “The Walking Dead” TV series on AMC in 2010.

And yet, much like “The Incredibles 2” made me feel like no time at all had passed since the original, “Zombieland: Double Tap” so effortlessly recaptures the winning rhythms of the first film that the only real evidence of the decade between those installments is how once-tiny Abigail Breslin, again playing Little Rock, has obviously grown up in the intervening years.

Rather than attempting to handwave it away, “Zombieland: Double Tap” puts Breslin’s maturity front and center, by having Little Rock run away with a fellow survivor her age, a hippie from Berkeley (Avan Jogia) who promises to take her to a peaceful sanctuary named Babylon (“Like the David Gray song,” he tells her, in one of many moments that plays with how much history the younger survivors would forget in the wake of a zombie apocalypse).

This necessitates a rescue party, during which the assertive and commitment-phobic Wichita (Emma Stone) wrestles with whether a relationship with the bookish and habit-prone Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) is what she really wants, and loud-mouthed tough-guy Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) appears to meet his match in Nevada (Rosario Dawson), a gunslinging fellow fan of Elvis Presley.

Part of why I suspect “Zombieland” lends itself so well to a sequel is that even its writers saw the original film as more of a sitcom than a movie — they even attempted to launch a “Zombieland” streaming series on Amazon Prime in 2013, which failed as a pilot without the chemistry of the film’s actors — which makes “Zombieland: Double Tap” less of a sequel than simply the next episode.

The underlying premise and essential character dynamics of the first “Zombieland” remain the same, but “Double Tap” offers some new categories of zombies, a few new rules for survival, and even the genre-obligatory escalation of the zombie threat, with the evolution of a tougher new breed of zombie.

What makes this work is that “Double Tap” is aware, not only of the tropes of the zombie genre as a whole, including the new ones that have cropped up since the original “Zombieland,” but also of its own tropes as a film franchise within that larger genre, as we see when Tallahassee and Columbus encounter their doppelgangers, a brawn-meets-brains duo of survivors from Albuquerque (Luke Wilson, sporting a full-on redneck drawl) and Flagstaff (Thomas Middleditch, as nerdy as he’s been since “Silicon Valley”).

It’s hilarious to see Tallahassee and Columbus’ total lack of self-awareness as they interact with twisted mirror images of themselves, but the fate of those other survivors supports Wichita’s argument that our protagonists, including her and Little Rock, have lasted as long as they have because of how well all their characters balance each other out.

Because much like many other ensemble-cast sitcoms, the group at the center of “Zombieland” is a family, which is readily apparent long before the narrative itself explicitly spells it out.

Perhaps the one sour note in “Double Tap” is new arrival Madison (Zoey Deutch), an airheaded survivor who wanders in and out of the story, mostly for the purpose of manufacturing tension between Columbus and Wichita, and being the subject of jokes that seemed excessively cruel to me, even for a film that opens with a glorious slow-motion sequence of zombies being shot and sliced to bloody bits.

This is more than leavened by the flashback return of a cast member from the first film in a gratuitous but entertaining end-credits scene, so don’t leave the theater too soon.