I never write about films that I haven’t seen, and what follows is merely a very strong suspicion that the latest incarnation of National Lampoon’s Vacation is not going to be a very good one. In fact I hazard a guess that it’s going to be completely and utterly unfunny. I know, declaring something in advance being unfunny and bad is not a very reasonable or just thing to do (I’m writing this about two weeks before the UK release) and it goes against the Code of Conduct. I watch all films with an open mind – however on this occasion I have no sympathy for the film makers, firstly them being part of the Hollywood Dream Machine, therefore they are already paid in full and secondly, I think the badness of Vacation will be another brilliant example of how comedy has been dead for over a decade now (at least in Hollywood), and finally, after almost a decade on I think I may have an idea about the cause of death.

My reasoning might seem nit-picky and irrelevant, but the Publicity Machine recently released a short spoof advert for the car to be featured as Ed Helms’ family wagon – in the veins of the 1983 original Wagon Queen Family Truckster, the monstrosity of a car ferrying our heroes from debacle to debacle, also being a source of some jokes. The new car – for some odd, post-Borat reason – is presented to us in a faux Albanian advert featuring an obviously East European-looking man (East Europeans apparently prefer glossy nylon suits from the early 1990s when they are not wearing their trademark gym trousers with the three stripes on the sides. I should know that, I’m Hungarian. Which is in Eastern Europe.) and a glamorously dressed woman, both of whom are smoking heavily. The advert is fairly problematic from all sorts of reasons: First, the clichéd characters presenting the car in an unmistakably 1990s fashion, which is not as funny as the real adverts of that period. Secondly Albania might be a great little country – and I happen to know on good authority that it’s people are friendly and hospitable – car manufacturing is not one of their major forte. You might say that this is irrelevant and the car and the advert only serves a comedic purpose – but what purpose is that exactly? Taking the piss of poorly made East European cars imported to the United States? After almost fifteen years after the last Yugo had been scrapped? It’s either a joke too late, or there is something much more devious is happening in the background.

To understand the importance of the fictional comedy-car in the Vacation-series, we have to look at the original. The ostentatious family estate was absolutely the product of it’s time; it’s a wonderful, subtle take on the American automotive industry, along with the 6000 SUXX featured in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop’s parody advert: unnecessarily big, gas-guzzling monstrosities, the very epitome of the deep depression Detroit went into in the early ‘70s – and if you ask me, they’re still very much in that state. The look of the car and every single feature represented everything that was bad about American cars of the 1980s; it looked frightening – stark contrast with the supposed “family” purpose – it was unreliable, not very nimble and an all-round nuisance. The wagon also invoked North America’s frontiers, the covered wagons that roamed into the unknown to make a life for themselves – the stupid, plastic-wooden panels on the car and the whole nature of called on an overly sentimental memory of the Old West. And that was a fine, well executed reoccurring joke. So what is the purpose of this new car, apart from being a device to recall jokes from the original?

The car is apparently an import – even though it’s understandable that the film makers shy away from taking the piss of Detroit again, it’s still doesn’t make any sense in terms of how the audience will relate to it. The original car was based on the existing Ford LTD County Squire. This new one looks like a Toyota Picnic or a Previa – so it would have been an obvious choice to make the fictional car Japanese. Or Chinese. But here’s my sneaking suspicion: they decided against it because they don’t want to alienate the Far East markets. Which is, on it’s own, not necessarily a bad thing – although the apparently over-engineered and useless features immediately call for a take on how technology is put into it for it’s own sake rather than to improve our “driving and travelling experience”, mostly featured in cars coming from industrially developed nations. But pinning it on a country which quite obviously can’t fight back reminds me of how in the remake of the Red Dawn the film makers had to remove all the references to Chinese invading forces and replace them with North Korean regalia in order to have a shot of the Chinese market; seems convoluted and a cheap excuse to somehow not to offend the larger potential audience. And here is the problem: they wanted to be “edgy” and “in-your-face” offensive (that’s what comedy has to be apparently these days, even if it comes out as a blokey, misogynist, loud, but not very funny). But during the developmental process, it seems that the accountants came into the room and told the creators to do some changes, otherwise the film won’t make any money in the mystical land called Overseas. And the film makers obeyed without hesitation, got a map and choose a country with a funny name.

There is nothing wrong with “edgy comedy”, God knows, done right it can be brilliant. But there is a great deal of difference between calling out the vice, folly and humbug and taking the piss of someone who can’t possibly defend his or herself. Making jokes of a poor East European country not being able to make a good enough car is just a bit more subtle from taking pot-shots at overweight women, or making everyone in Bangkok either a drug dealer or a male prostitute. Not to mention the fact that the joke itself doesn’t make any sense unless the product itself is made by – for example – Apple – since they try to make fun of something with too much advanced technology in it. But Apple or Tesla are big companies, with powerful CEOs, influential people, and they don’t like bad publicity. The film makers could have made up a fake American start-up or a German or French or any other European major car manufacturer to get the joke out, but they didn’t; they went on the Borat-way – not realising that Borat was not about Kazakhstan.

And the bottom line is this: film makers can get away with this kind of lowest common denominator of seemingly outspoken but rather pre 1970s dinosaur way of looking at the world, where anything other than white, male, heterosexual and Christian is treated with ridicule and contempt. There is nothing funny about a child repeating his or her dad’s dirty jokes – unless it’s about how wrong and inappropriate it is. Treating misogyny, sexism, racism and homophobia as non-existent – because apparently we are now beyond these, even though we sadly and obviously aren’t, when there are legitimate-looking organisations out there calling themselves ‘Man Rights Activist’ and the like – to get away with jokes like these in the guise of them being “ironic”, meanwhile massively winking towards the retrograde elements in the audience in a some sort of newly founded, horrible 21st Century version of innuendo is anything but helpful. Not to mention the fact that it’s just not funny. And I can forgive a great deal if the jokes are any good – but so far, I’m not laughing. I’d rather be proven wrong about all this, but I suspect I won’t laugh even once on Vacation.