Nowhere in any of the reports by the Red Cross on conditions at America’s most notorious gulag is it ever mentioned that a detainee was forced to eat a “cock meat sandwich.”

Yet upon arriving at the Caribbean prison after they are wrongly branded as terrorists, the heroes of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay are informed by a burly guard that this is exactly what’s on the menu. Given this flagrant disregard for the facts, non-partisan observers must conclude that this new film does not accurately reflect matters such as the US military’s ongoing contempt for the Geneva Conventions or the Patriot Act’s corrosive effects on the personal liberties of American citizens.

No, this is a less noble sort of movie. In fact, most viewers would consider it a stoner buddy comedy, one that’s as silly, smutty and scatological as any drooling waste-case would demand. But like its 2004 predecessor Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle — the story of two friends’ valiant quest through the wilds of New Jersey to get high and get fed — Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay takes the lowbrow comedy to somewhere it’s never been before.

The first time through, issues of race seldom raised in any kind of Hollywood feature provoked an edgier variety of laughs — now we get profiling, persecution and paranoia. With its mix of raunchy yuks and satirical barbs, this is where frat-boy fantasy collides with real-world politics.

In a pair of recent interviews, John Cho and Kal Penn, the actors who play Harold and Kumar, express amazement that such a risky collision of imperatives could exist at all. No other movie has so freely mixed up jokes about rendition with more conventional examples of smut. (“I think we have 35 vaginas in our movie,” notes Cho, “and the most grotesque penis ever seen on film.”) Yet the success of the first film — which initially failed at the box office but gradually became a huge seller on DVD — convinced the parties involved that they could go as far as they liked.

“The racial and social-commentary jokes in the first one were so popular with our audience, we all wanted to give that to them again,” says Cho in an interview at the Park Hyatt. “And what we did was partially informed by our own experiences. Kal and I were flying around doing press for the first movie and Kal was getting searched a lot. It would happen almost daily. One crazy story is that a white friend of Kal’s met us in one city and travelled to a couple of cities with us. [The friend] had just been on a camping trip so he had a hunting knife that he forgot to take out of his backpack. While Kal was getting searched and distracting the guards, that backpack went right through the machine! So with all that stuff going on, the writers just decided, ‘Huh… maybe we can go with this.’”

The writers of both films and also the directors of the second, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg concocted a storyline that picks up exactly where we left Harold and Kumar — en route to Amsterdam. Alas, some in-flight confusion involving the words “bong” and “bomb” results in the guys’ incarceration at Guantanamo, but they don’t stay cooped up for long. With a racist, clueless Homeland Security official on their tail (played by Rob Corddry, whose presence adds to the movie’s pervasive air of Daily Show–iness), they travel across America on an odyssey that features pantyless partygoers, a one-eyed inbred and Neil Patrick Harris running amok in a bordello. (Though the character of Neil Patrick Harris is again played by the man himself, the character of President George W. Bush unfortunately is not.)

Says Cho, “When I first read the script, I thought, ‘I wonder what we’re actually going to film because there’s no way we can actually shoot a bottomless party and George Bush smoking weed. And is there really going to be a cyclops in the movie? I love it, but who’s gonna say yes to that?’ And the studio said yes to just about everything — it was unbelievable.”

In an interview a few days later by phone from New York, Penn says he too was excited by the mix of outrage and outrageousness in Hurwitz and Schlossberg’s script. “What Jon and Hayden do so well is layering things,” he says. “There are people who enjoy Harold and Kumar just because of the raunch factor. If the toilet humour is all you want out of it, well, you will definitely get it. But if audiences are looking for something a little bit deeper, they can find that, too.”

Though he calls it “a film that’s somehow a political satire without being political,” Penn admits being initially concerned that that Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay might alienate parts of their audience. Cho also wondered how it would play.

“I worried that we were going too far sometimes,” says the Korean-American actor, who also stars as Sulu in J.J. Abrams’ forthcoming Star Trek revamp. “You never know what’ll happen. When you’re on the set, you’re trying to make yourself laugh and obey your own instincts and be transgressive right up to the edge of the line before people get upset and walk out — it’s a little dance you play. You can only satisfy yourself because there’s nobody around. I was also afraid the political stuff would get in the way of what you should really be paying attention to, which is big jokes. And really, the political stuff is at the service of the jokes.”

And the jokes are principally at the service of Harold and Kumar, Penn noting the consensus seems to be that “people like the films because they like the characters.” And rightly so — better than any other contemporary screen characters, the two dudes epitomize the weed-and-Xbox-enhanced state of arrested adolescence so popular among post-collegiate Americans of all colours and creeds. Yet the sequel also adds a few layers to them, especially Kumar — new revelations and one hilarious flashback suggest his abrasive behaviour may stem from his heartache over his ex-girlfriend Vanessa (Danneel Harris).

“You learn about what makes him tick,” says Penn, who had a more prestigious opportunity to display his acting chops when he played the lead in Mira Nair’s The Namesake. “You learn about how he may have taken this ex-girlfriend for granted even though he’s still in love with her. In that sense, this is almost a romantic comedy. And these are all things I didn’t know about Kumar when we shot the first film.”

The new movie also benefits from the leads’ obvious ease with each other, a result of the friendship they began while making the first movie in Toronto. Says Cho, “We stayed at a hotel near here and I remember calling [Kal] when we arrived for rehearsals and saying, ‘OK, every meal we eat from now until we start is gonna be together and every beer I have will be with you. So let’s try to make this friendship and get to a place where we make it believable.’ But this one was much easier. We have an actual friendship now.”

That said, they don’t play out their onscreen roles for real. “I’m more of a Harold in real life and he’s more of a Kumar,” says Penn. “The roles switch whenever somebody says ‘action.’ Otherwise, I’m the one who’s kind of quiet and subdued on set, in the corner reading a book. And he’s the one who’s very gregarious and making jokes.”

Though the dynamic may be reversed, Penn and Cho feel their real-life relationship enhances their chemistry. Likewise, their experiences inevitably influence what happens on screen, even when circumstances get as absurd as they do here.

“Being people of colour in America, it’s not like we even choose to deal with politics,” says Cho. “It’s just a part of our lives — Kal being pulled over at the airport is just one aspect of it. So the politics of the movies probably seem less pronounced to us than to other people. It’s something you’re involuntarily thinking about all the time.” 

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