On the surface, The Hangover is juvenile, ridiculous, and just a little low brow. Truly it is all that, but you know what? It’s actually pretty funny too. It’s a comedic perfect storm where three actors with good chemistry and timing, meet a funny script and a director that knows how to set up a joke. A nervous young woman is getting prepared for her wedding, and she gets a phone call from her husband-to-be’s best friend Phil (Bradley Cooper). Where are you, she asks, it’s five hours till the wedding. Yeah, Phil says as resignedly as possible, I don’t think we’re going to make that.

A comedic whodunit of sorts, the “heroes” of The Hangover asks two simple questions: what the heck happened to us last night, and how drunk were we? Phil, Stu (Ed Helms) and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) take Doug to Vegas for a bachelor party, and after a wild night consuming heroic amounts of alcohol, they wake up in their hotel suite without a single memory of what happened a few hours earlier. Oh, and Doug is missing. The guys slowly put together a vague idea of the events the prior night including Stu’s marrying a stripper (Heather Graham), kidnapping a tiger from Mike Tyson’s house, and ticking off a pair of Asian thugs. There was also a stay in the hospital, but how all these events tie together is hazy, and the whereabouts of Doug are still a mystery.

It’s not brilliant, but it’s really hilarious. A large amount of the credit goes to the actors for making you laugh with every revelation, every embarrassing situation, and every encounter with a character even more messed up then they are. The wonder is how easy they make their camaraderie seem on film; Cooper has never really been known for his broad physical comedy and Helms has always been more of a second banana than leading man material. Breakout status goes to Galifianakis, who’s been working diligently around Hollywood for a while, but makes a startlingly permanent impression here. I even laughed at the Mike Tyson cameo, even though I find the man pretty reprehensible. I guess the charm offensive between this and the new documentary Tyson is working.

Still though, there is something rather predictable about The Hangover, even the film sometimes itself acknowledges that events proceeding bear eerie similarity to something from another movie. It’s no big deal, and if you’re going to burrow, I always appreciate it when the script mans up and admits it. At the end of the day though, it’s all familiar in a good way. And in a film culture obsessed with the highly vaunted status of the PG-13, it’s also nice to see an R-rated comedy with the courage of its convictions. However, one can’t abide that a large swath of The Hangover veers wildly into some pretty low brow comedy with the aforementioned Asian gangsters that slur their English, as well as shrill, disagreeable girlfriends and strippers with a heart of gold.

But The Hangover stands on its own and is unquestionably funny enough to be enjoyable. Stick around through the end credits for a photo slideshow of vignettes from the boys’ lost weekend, which were surprisingly well done because usually when movies dangle the full revelation of the hidden detail, it has a habit of blowing up in our faces. However, The Hangover has a habit of beating the odds and it wins on the strength of its own simplicity and willingness to do just about anything for a laugh. It’s certainly not to everyone’s taste and it doesn’t stake out new ground in the Tipsy McStagger subgenre of college humour, but it’s genuinely funny and enjoyable in a bubbly crowd of theatre patrons eager for a laugh.