There’s a plot to Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, a messy jumble that’s more or less meant to be the origin story of a sentient Happy Meal. But it doesn’t matter. The “story,” such as it is, is merely a framework to perpetuate the kind of humor that’s become the trademark of Cartoon Network’s late night “Adult Swim” programming block. None of it really makes sense, but the beauty of ATHF is that “making sense” is antithetical to the humor. ATHF – and, indeed, most of the original programming on Adult Swim – stretches plotless comedy to its limits. There’s an internal logic at work that provides the baseline for the humor, but it hardly resembles anything you’d find in the real world. And yet it’s still funny.

God, how I hate analyzing the how’s and why’s of comedy. But we press on.

ATHF begins with one of those sequences you see so often in action movies, where the heroes engage in some kind of intense action that relates not at all to the real plot of the story. Frylock, Master Shake, and Meatwad are in Egypt for some reason, and escape from the pyramids while fending off a gigantic poodle that shoots lasers from its eyes. They run across Abe Lincoln, who reveals to them a spacecraft made of wood…

Look, really. This is fruitless. Relating the plot would take as long as the movie itself, because each sequence is a thin lead-in to the next joke without much of the engine work of a more traditional story. If you’ve gotten this far, you’re already interested and have a good idea of what you’re getting into. What you want to know is if it works.

The answer is “sort of.” ATHF:MFFT resembles nothing so much as a series of skits tied together by a (very) loose “origin” metaplot, with various fan favorite characters making cameos alongside the introduction of a few new ones. The humor itself doesn’t get tired, exactly, but you begin to see the wisdom in the truncated 15-minute length of each episode in the TV series. You can only strain the bounds of logic for so long before the attentive viewer starts picking out the patterns instead of just rolling with it.

At least, that’s what I did. (Hey, it’s not like any deeper brain functions were being engaged at the time.) And I found that all that comedic chaos is built on top of a very sturdy, very traditional, very old comedy formula, slightly updated in what I like to call “The Straight Man and the Asshole.” Each new “group” that enters the story is almost always a pair, and one is always somewhat reasonable (if dim) while the other is either hilariously stupid or hilariously belligerent. Our heroes personify all three, which is why they’re the heroes, I guess.

But the stretchmarks begin to show around the 60-minute mark. This formula really does work best in short bursts of concentrated insanity, as evidenced by the opening skit, a riotous send-up of those “let’s go out to the lobby” opening bits that no one within the show’s age demographic has witnessed live. That skit was by far the funniest, but maybe that’s just because it was the first one.

All of which sounds like I hated it. I didn’t. I laughed, often, through the entire running length. The joke just got a little thin, that’s all. My editor tells me ATHF:MFFT will be opening on about 250 screens, which sounds right. No one – no one – who isn’t already familiar with the material will seek it out. Oh, those poor ticket sellers, who have to figure out a meaningful way to summarize this movie to a curious John and Jane Q Public. In fact, that might make for a pretty funny skit…