The best gauge for a comedy is to see how much fun the cast appears to be having with it. That’s a subjective measure, to be sure, but if you see enough comedies you can get an idea if the people making it are into it. Ask yourself: Does it look like these people start laughing when the camera stops rolling? Are they approaching this material like something to enjoy, or something to get done?

The first Harold and Kumar movie was a joy to watch for that very reason. It was basically a series of sketches tied together by a simple concept: two stoners in their mid-20’s (John Cho as Harold or “Roldy,” Kal Penn as Kumar) get really, really high on pot one night and decide to go get some White Castle burgers. (They’re the tiny burgers; Southerners, think Krystal.) Shenanigans ensue, and in the H&K universe “shenanigans” can and do involve escaped cheetahs, redneck swingers, and Neil Patrick Harris. It was light, it was breezy, it was funny and unafraid to get weird. Those guys were having a good time.

And they’re having a good time again in Harold and Kumar: Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which picks up approximately two hours after the last one left off. (I think. Time is a little wonky in this movie, enough so that I actually noticed.) The boys are going to Amsterdam to chase down Roldy’s new lady fair (Paula Garcés)… or at least they are until Kumar lights up a “smokeless bong” apparatus in the plane’s lavatory. Crusty old white biddy a few rows up calls him a terrorist, and before you know it, an overzealous moron from the Department of Homeland Security (Rob Corddry) ships them off to Guantanamo. Whence the title.

They escape, work their way across the South to foil the wedding of Kumar’s old girlfriend (Danneel Harris) to a whitebread Abercrombie jerk, who just so happens to have connections to the President. Tricky. Especially when you factor in the shenanigans.

And the shenanigans are plenty. Escape from Guantanamo is a little clunkier than its predecessor—it takes awhile to get going, and in its aspiration to be weirder and wackier than the first movie it can often stray pretty far from what was funny about two stoners who like fast food. A few of the intended big laughs are telegraphed. But there are moments—sublime moments, the stuff from which comedy is made—that ultimately make Escape worthy. Look out for an unexpected cameo in a flashback.

The character that struck me was Corddry’s, the revealingly-named Ron Fox. The first movie’s racial humor came in from a lot of angles, but the Stupid White Guy really only manifested in one place: Officer Palumbo, played by Sandy Jobin-Bevans with perfect grown-up frat-boy belligerence.

Fox is a different beast, a clumsy wielding of American power and clichéd attitudes about people of other races. (He attempts to bribe Goldstein and Rosenberg with a sack of pennies, and a black man with a can of grape soda.) Uh, okay, so maybe he’s not all that different at all. Just take Officer Palumbo and give him federal funding. Fox is so bad that the NSA analyst (played by Roger Bart) becomes, by default, the good guy. What a world.

That may be a lot to put on a movie that features Neil Patrick Harris downing mushrooms like they were popcorn. And Escape makes no pretense at directly addressing or solving any of the larger problems of how our country behaves within and without (a couple awkward stoner-speeches aside.) It’s just a goofy comedy, but it’s a goofy comedy with some awareness of the world it operates in. It’s also, for the most part, breezy. Effortless. That’s enough to make it a cut above.

Also: Stay till after the credits.