It’s doubtful that Harold Ramis and company were trying to conjure the ghost of Eddie Cantor with Year One, mostly because their target audience of mall kids doesn’t know who that is. But the film, which stars Jack Black and Michael Cera as outcast cavemen anachronistically shticking their way through the early chapters of the Bible, recalls nothing so much as the great vaudevillian’s Roman Scandals — right down to the aggressively un-PC bent of the humor.

In Cantor’s defense, he made his movie (which included an extended blackface musical number) in 1933. Year One’s relentless homophobia, meanwhile, is simply retrograde (it doesn’t even have the cunning, we’re-all-pals quality of the gay-bashing in any number of frat-pack comedies). It’s not that there aren’t good gags to be had in a film set largely within Sodom, just that Ramis and his co-writers couldn’t think of any, just as his technical personnel couldn’t be bothered to give this collection of sub-SNL-quality sketches and dead-air improvisations the form of an actual movie (the lack of craft here is staggering).

That Black and Cera actually turn in relatively appealing performances is almost beside the point. While nobody should expect cutting-edge filmmaking in a farce fuelled by foreskin jokes, Year One’s aesthetic and attitudinal laziness is the opposite of affable.