Idiocracy begins with a bombastic voice-over, describing the sorry state of America in the year 2505. In the future, the stupid have reproduced far more than the smart, and humanity has bred itself into a state of sub-moronic idiocy, where citizens sit on hybrid easy chair / toilets, sucking liquid sustenance from plastic nipples and watching television shows such as Ow, My Balls! Luke Wilson, literally an average Joe (his name is Joe, and the movie goes on at some length about his averageness — see what Mike Judge did there?) finds himself transported into a future where everyone around him is a grunting, obdurate moron, and he, suddenly, is the smartest man on Earth.Admittedly, Idiocracy has moments that are genuinely funny and clever, if not brilliant. Especially sharp are Judge’s riffs on corporate omnipresence, increasingly juvenile marketing slogans, and America’s perceived distaste for all things intelligent. My personal favorites from Judge’s dark future include “Monday Night Rehabilitation” (where criminals are ruthlessly run over by gigantic, phallic monster trucks) and America’s shrieking, gun-toting President, a professional wrestler named Camacho.But the film’s aggressive idiocy — full to the brim of fart jokes, explosions, and other unpleasant things that the film is supposedly condemning — gets tiring after awhile. Idiocracy isn’t really satirical in the sense of foretelling an unpleasant future, instead choosing to catalogue and exaggerate unpleasant things that already exist in present day. Not only is this vision of the future not terribly prophetic, it’s also more than a little uneven: in a world where most people are unable to complete a sentence or a thought, a brutally efficient dystopian police forces still somehow descends on our heroes at a moment’s notice, and even the most sophisticated technology, despite the apparent lack of anyone intelligent enough to manufacture or repair it, is still mostly in good working order.Of course, it might seem curmudgeonly to poke holes in what is mostly a lighthearted, lowbrow comedy on the level of Beavis and Butthead, but something about the heralding of Idiocracy as a scathing, insightful satire leaves me troubled. It seems to have, at its core, a message of unalloyed snobbery; that people, at large (the audience conveniently excluded, of course) are all stupid, and that “our” only hope is to outbreed “them,” cranking out our Little Smarties just as fast as we can. Idiocracy wants to have it both ways, expecting the audience to enjoy the comic novelty of monster-truck rallies and profanity-spewing vending machines, even as it sneeringly derides everyone who would dare be so base as to enjoy such things. At best, Idiocracy achieves a sort of defensive, heavy-handed, average-Joe contempt, giving the audience full license to assert their superiority without offering anything truly challenging.Despite its shortcomings as any kind of moral fable, however, Idiocracy is (again) not a bad film. There are many inventive and funny moments, and overall I’d say it’s worth watching, especially if you enjoyed Office Space (or its far closer cousin in tone and execution, Judge’s King of the Hill). As a cautionary tale or an indictment of our way of life, however, Idiocracy is scattershot at best — a movie blasting fart jokes in condemnation of fart jokes. Fox did their best to make sure this film didn’t do well — it really seems to me that they needn’t have bothered.