Pornography, chicken both more appealing than stale ‘Porn ‘n Chicken’

Tim Kearns

It is a long-recognized fact that comedy comes best in pairs. Who can forget comedy teams like Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy or Bush and Gore? In a spirit more accustomed to the last pair, Comedy Central has made its first-ever original motion picture, titled “Porn ‘n Chicken,” which will make its debut on the cable network at 9 p.m. on Sunday.

Think the title’s funny? If so, you’re just the kind of person who might find something to enjoy in the film.

For everyone else, it will seem to be a raunchy sex comedy with no raunchiness, very little sex and comedy only the perpetually stoned will laugh at.

The story involves several guys and one girl who found the “Porn ‘n Chicken” club on an anonymous Ivy League campus (in fact, the actual club was founded at Yale).

The club consists of a bunch of people who get together, eat fried chicken, watch pornography and drink “cheap” beer — and at this point, I should mention that if for no other reason, you should despise this movie because these college students consider Miller Genuine Draft cheap beer.

Then, of course, they run into a dean who doesn’t like the club because a candidate for governor is donating money to the school. The club decides to move on to bigger and better things, starting with filming their own pornographic film in the library called “The StaXXX.”

Supposedly wacky adventures ensue, and the plot acts like a police search team, dragging up the dead bodies of nearly every college movie of the last 20 years.

The cast is almost all new to the movie-making game, and they do a decent job with what they have to work with, but that’s not saying much.

Every role except for Hutch, the narrator (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), is essentially an extended cameo. The danger is that the film is totally unaware of this, so when supposedly huge surprises are thrown at the viewer, it’s unsurprising. When it turns out a club member happens to be gay, rather than be surprised at this twist, it’s more likely that the response will be “who was that guy again?”

As for a couple of advertised cameos by the Laurence Oliviers of the porn industry: Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson — they’re throwaways even for your biggest porn fanatics. Rather than use the art of cameo to cleverly cast Jeremy as a janitor or bartender, he plays himself — rather poorly. So any humor from those who would have looked and said “Hey, Ron Jeremy’s in this!” is negated by the deliberate penile product placement that is Jeremy.

Perhaps the most interesting part of “Porn ‘n Chicken” is watching aghast as the script literally plagiarizes from other movies, notably Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” and “American Pie,” both films well worth watching on Oct. 13 instead.

It’s not there’s anything particularly terrible about “Porn ‘n Chicken,” but it’s certainly not Comedy Central’s “A” material. If they really wanted to produce something entertaining, there are always re-runs of the long-lost “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” “South Park” or “Kids in the Hall.”

“Porn ‘n Chicken” has the depth (no pun intended) of pornography, but what else could you expect from a film assembled from deleted scenes from “American Pie 2,” “Road Trip,” “Animal House” and “Loser”? It gets the plot basics right and the acting is sufficient, but the humor is lost. The only real humor about “Porn ‘n Chicken” is that all it takes for a student to understand existentialism is to smoke some powerful drugs.

The rest is jokes about someone’s name being Dick, used in proximity to other words that probably tested well in focus groups or broad stereotypes of stereotypes, taking what seemed honest about “American Pie” and turning it into a mockery.

It’s a shame when Comedy Central made their first original motion picture, they forgot the part about originality.

As far as ways to spend a Sunday night, I think the Porn ‘n Chicken club at Yale would spend it watching pornography, eating fried chicken and drinking beer rather than watching “Porn ‘n Chicken.” Truth be told, their time is probably better spent.