Trey Parker and Matt Stone have long played on a very simple way of digging up comedy out of the idyllic playgrounds of kids’ entertainment. The sleight of hand is easy, in fact. After all, what separates the cut-out figures in “South Park” from the construction-paper collages that adorn schoolroom walls across America?  Only honesty: most kids are tirelessly and spiritedly vulgar, and Parker and Stone have seized on this to create some of the best satire in recent memory. They strike an anarchic note because, in “South Park”, there is no agenda, no message at all, really, just the ferocious destruction of the sanctimonious, contrived cultural sensitivity of the Clinton years.

Oh, and feces. Lots of feces. Drafting puppets to fight in their juvenile skirmishes was a deft move. “Team America” thrives on the bizarre disconnect between watching “Thunderbirds”-style characters use profanity, perform sex acts, and blow the stuffing out of each other with toy weapons. Action movies take it on the chin, chiefly Bruckheimer’s bloated spectacles. (The execrable “Pearl Harbor” was chosen for the most memorable takedown, an arbitrary but apt choice as the subject for one of Parker’s signature tunes.)  The film hits almost no dud notes in savaging the conventions of action flicks.

My favorite moment was the scene in which the demoralized hero gets drunk at a bar and vomits—repeatedly and voluminously—in the alley outside. That joke succeeds for the same reason the marathon, Kama-Sutra-According-to-Barbie-and-Ken sex scene does. Parker and Stone aren’t deviating from the standard action movie script, they’re just showing us what would logically happen if the cameras were left rolling on these characters. Does anyone think Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Cruise, Cage gently bed their women like raffish Harlequin himbos?  Forget the “four-G, inverted dive with a MiG-28”; the most unbelievable moment in “Top Gun” is when Maverick makes eye contact with his sex partner.

If only “Team America” could be received on that level—a brilliantly observed, technically amazing puppet show that fills ninety minutes of our lives with laughter. Inevitably, though, in this election year, fraught as it is with warring political factions, “Team America” will be examined as a message movie. The film fiendishly tickles our conditioned grasp for meaning. What are they trying to say?  Who are they attacking?  Who are the good guys, and who are the bad?  Are they for Bush’s America or against it?  Clues are given, but every trail goes cold.

Sure, one can hold up the P.D.A. (Pussies/Dicks/Assholes) speech as the film’s central message, one which puts every faction in its rightful place, with the destructive Americans ascendant. But that ignores everything the film has been destroying for the previous hour and a half. Implied in the anarchy of this film is a warning—distilling messages from this stew of delirious gross-out  humor is a pointless act. A person who walks out of the theater viewing the world using the P.D.A. paradigm is as foolish as “Bardwin” and his dimwitted cohorts.

Critics tend to allow certain nuances in the comedy and deny others, but if one grants that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are gifted satirists—and they certainly are—then bald interpretations of even their most slapstick material are not permissible. For example, in their attacks on the Hollywood left, it’s not really accurate to say that Parker and Stone don’t believe works of art, so long as they are made with seriousness and artistry, can change the world for the better. The celebrities in “Team America” are skewered not for their films but for trading on the cult of their celebrity. Michael Moore is painted as gluttonous socialist, but nothing is said of “Fahrenheit 9/11”. Susan Sarandon gets lampooned, but “Dead Man Walking” is left unscathed. The assault is on the self-importance of these real-life puppets, not their movies or their messages. With the recent appearance of Sean Penn’s humorless riposte to Parker and Stone, they were obviously on to something.