What is a puppet? I ask that sincerely, as after watching the new film The Happytime Murders (released August 24), I have lost my (admittedly tenuous) grasp on the very concept. In Brian Henson’s film (he is indeed of that Henson family), puppets are a marginalized species (?) who constantly refer to their felt skin and the stuffing that makes up their insides. And yet we learn in one scene that they also have livers that can be successfully transplanted into the human body.

A gunshot to the head will kill a puppet, so presumably they have some kind of brain, made of some unknown organic substance? We see a puppet fatally torn apart by a pack of dogs, and yet when some rowdy teens pluck out a poor puppet’s eye, he’s able to pop it back in good as new. Humanoid puppets ejaculate silly string; a cow puppet produces what looks to be actual milk; an Easter bunny puppet shits plastic Easter eggs and secretes some kind of glittery purple substance. Puppets have sex drives and digestive systems and can smoke cigarettes, so presumably they have respiratory function. Sugar gets them high like cocaine. But they are still, again, puppets. I think? One could spend hour upon hour trying to figure how these things are supposed to fit into the fabric (heh) of existence, were the film to even remotely merit such consideration.

I’m perfectly willing to suspend a hearty amount of disbelief should a movie earn devotion in other ways. But pedantry is all I’ve got for Happytime, a torturously unfunny movie that has the feel of something dusted off from old late-night cable—an early-2000s Comedy Central raunch-fest made for snickering college freshmen who had just barely begun to explore the depravities of the Internet, and thus were quite tickled by the idea of puppets swearing and sexing. Of course, puppets saying naughty things has been done well before, in the Tony-winning Broadway musical Avenue Q. But that was for girls and gays, man. The Happytime Murders? This one’s for the boys.

I suppose I should make some sort of gesture toward the film’s plot. Our lead puppet is a grizzled P.I. hilariously named Phil Philips (I’m gonna guess screenwriter Todd Berger is not an American Idol fan), once the only puppet on the Los Angeles police force, now sucking down bourbon and working low-life cases in scuzzy corners of the city. He has an assistant named Bubbles (Maya Rudolph, bringing an almost heartbreaking dignity to this miserable project) and an ex-partner, Connie, played by Melissa McCarthy. Connie and Phil find themselves reunited, bickering all the while, as they investigate a series of grisly murders linked to an old puppet show called The Happytime Gang, which was the first positive, and popular, representation of puppets on television.

So there is an actual history here. There were puppet firsts. And yet The Happytime Murders only wants to explore that in so much as it wants to make a hideously clumsy allegory, attempting to equate the struggles of its puppets with those of racial minorities in America. It’s a device that’s supposed to be biting and clever and meaningful, while still using real-world racial stereotypes to depict its puppet characters. It’s the kind of useless, inept social satire that has been birthed by a thousand South Park fans, the kind that thinks it can make the bad joke if it points to the bad joke and says “this is a bad joke.” There may be some examples of this trick being done successfully, but The Happytime Murders is a grand temple to a long record of failures.

Not a single bit lands in The Happytime Murders. McCarthy sometimes comes close, as does Rudolph—but what surrounds them is so aggressively, lamely crass that it would take a true Herculean effort to elevate anything in the film to laugh-worthy. And so, one must sit through The Happytime Murders in rigid silence, as puppets are killed and groped and seduced and exploited to the point that I started to feel bad for them, before remembering that none of it was real and nobody had to make this if they didn’t want to.

I’m all for strange, outside-the-box fare getting produced and wide-released—hurray for weirdness in the multiplexes! But the weirdness in The Happytime Murders is only in service of cheap and regressive comedy that was stale 10 years ago. And now? With all we’ve got going on? Well, I suppose I’ll quote our dear leader, the kind of dummy this film was perhaps made for, and simply say, no puppet.