Cheeky Gags Open Another Season of ‘Beach’

“Son of the Beach,” which begins its third season at 10 tonight on FX, would seem to be an argument that you can judge a show by its title. Ribald and politically incorrect, the series leaves no double entendre alone, no pun unintended. But to dismiss it as just plain dumb would be wrong.

Tonight’s one-hour installment seemingly draws upon the three B’s of television: “Baywatch,” which the series as a whole parodies; “Benny Hill’s” tales of sex and the silly; and “Big Brother,” or, more precisely, the unscripted-TV craze.

Virtually everything on the show is a joke. Start with some of the tamer character names: Kimberlee Clark; Porcelain Bidet. Then there’s the hero, Notch Johnson (a deadpan Tim Stack), the world’s greatest lifeguard the way Maxwell Smart of “Get Smart” was the world’s greatest spy. “I’ve taken quite a shine to Porcelain,” Notch says at one point.

This week, he and his swimsuit-clad crew from the city of Malibu Adjacent become contestants on a “Temptation Island”-style show. It’s the brainchild of network owner Tex Finkelstein (guest star Jason Alexander), who reacts to the high ratings by saying, “Woohoo! I’ll be hogtied and schmaltzed like a herring.”

As usual, “Son of the Beach” employs bathroom humor, sexual innuendo and raunchy sight gags in a scattershot approach that yields many hits and misses.

Each episode is also rife with equal-opportunity offending. A partial list of targets tonight: whites, blacks, Latinos, blond women, gay men, Jews, neo-Nazis, Catholic priests, the disabled and sadomasochists. With just about everyone being made fun of, it’s hard to work up much outrage.

And right when you think the humor will never rise above schoolboy level, along comes a zinger about something weightier, like product placement or the troubling coverage of “reality” shows as news by self-promoting networks.

“Son of the Beach” isn’t the smartest or funniest show on TV, but it is confident enough to forgo a laugh track and, in the end, can be classified as cleverly stupid.