LOS ANGELES—“When a monkey nibbles on the weenis, it’s funny in any language.”

Alan, the round, scruffy idiot savant (or maybe just idiot) of The Hangover Part II, utters that deadpan-strange aphorism while a monkey indeed gnaws on what looks like a monk’s, er, weenis through his clothes on a Bangkok bus. When asked about his new movie in an L.A. hotel room, Zach Galifianakis, the actor who plays Alan, is similarly round, scruffy, and prone to deadpan one-liners or—more often—dead silence.

“I think what they said was pretty good,” Galifianakis says, after director Todd Phillips and screenwriter Craig Mazin explain how the developmentally stunted nutter Alan sees himself and his reluctant posse, Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms), as 12-year-old boys. Or something like that. In any case, Galifianakis isn’t elaborating. While noting this, one also notes the following: most of the words he does speak—in his dry, boyishly pitched way
—elicit much laughter.

In The Hangover Part II (now playing) and its predecessor, The Hangover, Galifianakis’s Alan is both the wrong kind of trouble to hang with and the right kind for a demented blockbuster comedy. In The Hangover, the oddball trio misplaces the groom during a Las Vegas bachelor party involving accidental roofie ingestion. The next day, men continue behaving badly.

Its sequel drops Alan, Phil, and Stu in Bangkok, Thailand, for further substance-swallowing trouble, morning-after madness, freaky strip clubs, and freakier Russians. The overgrown child with a few screws loose—who wakens in a deeply sleazy motel room with the others, but without his hair—is likely to blame.

“We put things in because they’re too raunchy,” Galifianakis says when asked if the raunchiest moments were perhaps left out of the movie and saved for a future release. Fair enough. Nobody said there wasn’t raunchiness galore. Suddenly, the actor who also starred in the odd-couple comedy Due Date with Robert Downey Jr. and the Brooklyn loser-hipster comedy series Bored to Death is seemingly feeling chatty. “This story kind of calls for Phil and Stu and kind of all of us to clash,” he says. “Phil and I have a relationship that’s kind of: I admire him but he gets mad at me. He’s real gentle with me in the first film. But this one, I think he’s at his wits’ end.”

And why not? In Bangkok, the bearded, shaven-headed Alan resembles a prison-camp escapee—one wearing a girlish straw hat and a T-shirt adorned with a Labrador doggy photo. He says wildly inappropriate things at wildly inappropriate moments. He is a bad-people magnet. But in this film we first meet the self-described “stay-at-home son” living with his wealthy parents. “To go behind the scenes, to see people in their environment, to see Alan in his bedroom,” he says, “I think was really kind of fun.” The bedroom features posters of Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. Later, Helms’s Stu sings Joel’s “Allentown”—but, clearly, in The Hangover II’s world, it’s “Alantown”.

Is Alan just possibly crazier this time around? “Yeah, I think he’s in a lot of mental trouble for the rest of his life. Yeah.”

Yeah.

Watch the trailer for The Hangover Part II.