Having watched Robin Williams, Steve Martin, and even Jim Carrey sink into the slough of family comedy, I'm grateful for the total irony of movies like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Napoleon Dynamite, A Dirty Shame, the new Nacho Libre, Strangers With Candy, and – fingers crossed – the upcoming Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. The "heroes" of these movies are physically unprepossessing and morally no better than they ought to be, yet they weather the same crises and enjoy the same triumphs as straight romantic heroes. The movies aim blissfully low (Nacho Libre includes some of the most deftly incidental fart jokes and the funniest wedgie in movie history) and yet have the much-noted brain-tickling ambiguity of the mock heroic: Are we laughing because the protagonists fall short of the heroic-romantic ideal or is the ideal itself the object of the parody because of how far it is from our daily experience? Or both?

Anchorman, Strangers With Candy, and Nacho Libre are conceptual comedies but lack the high style of the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty, the literary-satiric qualities of Alexander Payne's Citizen Ruth, Election, and About Schmidt, or the cinematic self-consciousness of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. The writers, directors, and stars of these put-ons know what they're doing, but their movies also have an unupholstered "Three Stooges" accessibility because they wrap their dirt-level comic instincts around the concepts. (The marvelous Intolerable Cruelty did the reverse and missed with both lowbrow and highbrow audiences.)

The paradox of Anchorman, Napoleon Dynamite, Strangers With Candy, and Nacho Libre is that they ask you to identify with slobby protagonists but not in a slobby way. They don't pimp their emotions to pay for the slapstick, as family comedy does. They couldn't be called high comedy and yet they're drier than any romantic comedy out there. And they don't bait us with irony and then switch to romance, in the manner of Be Cool, Wedding Crashers, The Ice Harvest, and Find Me Guilty. Rather, the regression is intentional and controlled – mature, crafted puerility. They're what Jerry Lewis movies would have been without the schmaltz – geysers of character comedy whistling hot out of the blowhole.

Though Nacho Libre didn't make me laugh as hard as Anchorman or Napoleon Dynamite, its star Jack Black does have some romantic assets that make his buffoonery striking in a different way from Will Ferrell's or Jon Heder's. The ungainly Ferrell and the gawky Heder use their characters' unawareness of their limitations as they enter arenas for which they're completely unsuited (think of Ferrell as Ron Burgundy doing bicep curls to show off his "guns") to create an inverted form of heroism. They bypass the old slapstick masochism of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd as juveniles failing at sports and almost make you envy their obliviousness. The "magic" is to add insensitivity to the clumsiness and not get "cute" about it.