Taking stupid seriously

STUPID has never looked so smart.

Dimwitted comedies have been making a killing at the ticket counter. “Talladega Nights” has grossed $147.9 million. “Jackass: Number Two” was a No. 1 box-office hit and has grossed $64.1 million. And there’s a frenzy building for the upcoming “Borat,” a travelogue by the titular Kazakh journalist.

But the reward isn’t merely financial. A number of these seemingly lowbrow movies are surprisingly high-minded and have more on their agendas than just fart jokes: It’s the difference between the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges. “Borat” is ultimately a story about ignorance and racism, while “Talladega Nights” offers a sly sendup of NASCAR culture. Even though it received a stumblebum release, Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy” scores more political points than a week’s worth of “The Colbert Report.”

These movies still try to satisfy the mass audience’s appetite for physical, visceral comedy -- “Borat’s” signature scene is an extended wrestling match between two naked men. But the films still manage to turn foolishness into pointed social commentary.

“I don’t want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of ‘Idiocracy’ and ‘Borat,’ without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture,” says Adam McKay, director and co-writer of “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” “It’s one thing to mess stuff up and break stuff, but [Borat] is really pointing out the ideology of America. It’s one thing to break stuff and damage people’s possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that’s dangerous comedy.”

“Talladega Nights,” written by McKay and Will Ferrell, finds the heart of contemporary America in the world of stock-car racing: The movie’s champion driver is a fun-loving, hard-charging, star-spangled “doer” played by Ferrell with more than a touch of George W. Bush, who meets his nemesis in the guise of Sacha Baron Cohen (who also plays Borat) as a gay, espresso-sipping, jazz-loving, Camus-reading racer.

“As soon as we talked about doing a NASCAR movie and came up with the Ricky Bobby character, we realized the tension of it. We’d mention it to people and they’d have two responses, either ‘I hate NASCAR’ or ‘NASCAR is awesome.’ It was so polarizing right off the bat ... we were very aware we were going into this cultural hot zone, that this was the epicenter of red state culture,” says McKay. “The living nightmare for a red state NASCAR driver would be a gay French driver.”

“Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” follows a hopelessly unsophisticated television host as he makes his way across America. Shot in a run-and-gun style, the film shows Borat in a number of scenes where he encounters ordinary Americans.

As a consequence of Borat’s naive but nonetheless leading questioning (the movie lists five screenwriters), these seemingly average citizens quickly and casually expose their own racism, homophobia, misogyny and anti-Semitism. At one point, Borat asks a gun store salesman which weapon is best for killing Jews. Without missing a beat, the guy behind the counter reaches for a suitable hand gun.

“I think it’s part of the genius of Sacha, his ability to bring that out in people through the innocence of the character. He created a character who is so naive and lovable that people want to teach him, want to show him things and help, and in doing so reveal themselves,” says Todd Phillips, the director and co-writer of the recent “School for Scoundrels.” (Phillips was the original director of “Borat” before exiting the project and receives a co-story credit on the final film, which was directed by Larry Charles.)

Meanwhile, writer-director Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy” -- a comedy starring Luke Wilson as an average American who participates in the government’s top-secret hibernation program only to wake up 500 years later -- attracted critical attention for its satirical portrayal of a distant future in which dumbing down has bottomed out. The film is an angry and disillusioned portrait of a world where nuance, subtlety and discourse have been swallowed by a lowest-common-denominator hegemony. (The era’s most popular -- and Oscar-winning -- movie is called simply “Ass.”)

Its studio, 20th Century Fox, didn’t have a clue what to do with “Idiocracy” (Fox didn’t preview the long-delayed movie for critics before releasing it with hardly any publicity or marketing support) and Judge, who co-wrote the script with Etan Cohen, declined interview requests. But critics and a small handful of moviegoers -- ticket sales totaled just $444,000 -- took notice.

“Judge has a gift for delivering brutal satire in the trappings of low comedy and for making heroes out of ordinary people whose humanity makes them suspect in a world where every inch of space, including mental, is mediated,” Times critic Carina Chocano wrote in her “Idiocracy” review. “The plot, naturally, is silly and not exactly bound by logic. But it’s Judge’s gimlet-eyed knack for nightmarish extrapolation that makes ‘Idiocracy’ a cathartic delight.”

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Do audiences get the joke?

IN some ways, these new movies are following in the footsteps of seemingly lowbrow, secretly smart comedy, from Buster Keaton to Bugs Bunny to “Blazing Saddles,” “The Simpsons” and “South Park.”

There is likely no real, empirical way to determine how much of what’s going on in the new group of films will register with audiences. “Borat,” “Idiocracy” and “Talladega Nights” were made for mainstream moviegoers, after all, and none of their filmmakers wants to be seen as a detached elitist, a navel-gazing solipsist or a seltzer-in-the-pants vaudevillian.

By directly addressing contemporary culture through a sleight of hand of referential joke telling, these projects exploit the pop vocabulary, illustrating more esoteric points while keeping audiences happy. The marionettes in 2004’s “Team America: World Police,” for example, spoofed action-movie conventions, but the film’s story focused on the perils of patriotic fever.

David Zucker, who directed the last two entries in the “Scary Movie” franchise as well as such revered classics as “Airplane!” and two of the three “Naked Gun” pictures, says that in any comedy, regardless of one’s position on the sliding scale of smart versus dumb, “the audience is the boss.”

“We definitely write with the audience in mind,” Zucker says, referring to the team of writers who create the cavalcade style of his films. “We think everything is funny until we put it in front of an audience, and if they don’t get it we can’t leave it in there. We don’t say the audience is dumb or wrong, we respect what the audience gets.”

But sometimes audiences will go wherever filmmakers take them, as long as they are guided along the way.

“The director of any movie is a purveyor of tone,” says Phillips, whose credits include “Old School” and “Starsky & Hutch.” “So for me it’s about the humor falling within the world you’ve set up. I think an audience, even subconsciously, recognizes when you break out of the world of a movie. So it’s not that you’re ‘going too far,’ it’s a matter of watching the tone of the movie.”

Not every dumb comedy engages in the strategy of the secretly smart to make satirical points. Perhaps nothing manages to obliterate the line between stupid and smart quite like the wildly successful “Jackass” movies.

In the recently released sequel, “Jackass: Number Two,” star Johnny Knoxville and his band of daffy stuntmen create another non-narrative series of excruciating physical, yet somehow gut-wrenchingly funny, stunts. In one, a man puts his penis inside a sock puppet, and then allows a snake to chomp down on it. Other pranks are even more crudely homoerotic.

Jeff Tremaine, the director of both “Jackass” films, will admit to no higher intentions than laughter in making his movies, nor is he particularly bothered by those who don’t find his brand of humor amusing.

“We know what we think is funny, so if someone doesn’t think it’s funny we’re just different from that person,” he says.

But Hollywood has always been a political town, and other directors see their works engaging moviegoers on issues. Ed Zwick can let his upcoming drama “Blood Diamond” bring attention to exploitive mining practices; Michael Moore’s documentaries touch on guns, war and healthcare; and Judge can use “Idiocracy” as a wake-up call against apathy.

For a filmmaker such as McKay, an occasional contributor to political blog the Huffington Post, the resurgence of mixing smart and stupid is also a way to navigate the concerns of corporate ownership and globalized initiatives that are such a part of the current world of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.

“I think the reason it came back is because of the way entertainment is now structured, whether it’s the movies or TV or radio, you have to entertain to get on the stage,” he says. “You have to, to play the game at all. If you’re making comedies, they have to have a fun and a rhythm to them. It’s much harder now to make a movie like Albert Brooks’ ‘Real Life.’ Look what happened to ‘Idiocracy.’ It’s a real harsh environment. You need to entertain on this visceral level to really captivate people.”

Ruminating further, McKay alights upon another, perhaps purer, reason for the reemergence of this roughhouse mix of high and low, what truly makes stupid the new smart.

“We’re in this era of so many talking heads and pundits and so much discourse about the direction of our country -- two-dimensional talk -- the idea of just laughter is a great, powerful thing, and there’s something to be said for it,” he says. “What better way to couch ideas than in a big, silly comedy.”

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john.horn@latimes.com