The scandalous title has loomed for months now, almost too strange to be true: “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay”?

Dude — seriously?

But the second weed-friendly adventure for the Asian-American odd couple — the first being the 2004 cult favorite “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” — finally wafts into theaters next weekend, and at least one contingent eagerly awaits the return of the franchise-in-the-making.

“We’ve done interviews with people who report on Guantanamo Bay, and they say that people in the military involved in Guantanamo think it’s hysterical,” said Hayden Schlossberg, a co-director of the new film with his friend, Jon Hurwitz, with whom he wrote both installments.

But fair warning is in order to these and other potential fans: The Guantanamo visit takes five minutes of screen time. For most of the movie, Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) are on the run in an exaggerated American South from buffoonish Homeland Security tsar Ron Fox (Rob Corddry). Harold and Kumar become fugitives the moment Kumar brandishes a bong that resembles a bomb on a plane to Amsterdam — the pair’s destination at the end of “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.”

“We wanted the movie to pick up right where the first one left off,” the 29-year-old Mr. Schlossberg said, “because we’re a huge fan of sequels in the ’80s that did that: ‘Back to the Future,’ ‘Karate Kid,’ ‘Rocky.’ It wasn’t a conscious decision to actually make a movie about Guantanamo Bay. It was a device.”

With the prison camp as a jumping-off (and selling) point, Messrs. Hurwitz and Schlossberg approached writing the comedy with special care, though not of the sensitivity-training sort — this is, after all, the Harold and Kumar of outrageously sent-up stereotypes — but rather a balance of different approaches to comedy. Films featuring satire that plays off cultural tensions and political issues often find mixed success with audiences, so in this case, the screenwriters strove for a mix of humor.

“If the movie gets too political, then you lose the audience,” Mr. Hurwitz, 30, said. “If the movie is just about the fart jokes, then it’s a dumb movie. The sophomoric comedy and the social satire work off each other. We’re huge fans of ‘South Park,’ where they do that all the time.” In one example of this method in the film, Mr. Corddry’s over-the-top tough guy uses a copy of the Constitution as much-needed toilet paper in order to intimidate two prisoners. The screenwriters honed their method of envelope-pushing during their first outing, in which they inflated and exploded ethnic and other stereotypes. That strain of humor is alive and well in the sequel. In their effort to reach the Texas wedding of an old flame whose fiancé has friends in high places, Harold and Kumar blunder into a Ku Klux Klan kegger and crash with a hillbilly couple who have a one-eyed child. In another sequence, Goldstein (David Krumholtz) and Rosenberg (Eddie Kaye Thomas), the pair’s Jewish neighbors from the first movie, resurface in a Homeland Security interrogation room, where they’re offered a bribe: a bag of pennies.

In the latter case, Mr. Hurwitz drew on personal childhood experience.

“We lived outside Pittsburgh when I was in first through seventh grade, and I was not in a very diverse town,” he said. “There were kids who threw pennies at myself or other Jewish students to make fun of us. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the way the world is, and that sucks, but I’ll move on and have my life.'”

In keeping with the notion of skewering and dispelling stereotypes, the directors say they conceived the whole movie as a corrective to post-September 11, 2001, malaise. Their exaggerated parodies are intended to mock images of America as “a warmongering nation that’s a laughingstock to the world.” An appearance by a frat-house “President Bush” is played for a conciliatory love of one’s country, if not always of “the government.”

“It’s almost a form of therapy for us and fans of our movies to take a look at the world, the post-9/11 paranoia, and expose the absurdity,” Mr. Hurwitz said.

Which brings us back to Guantanamo Bay’s cameo in the movie. But what happens there (think gay panic, not “Midnight Express”), or what drugs Neil Patrick Harris (who returns to play a fictional version of himself) ingests this time around, may surprise you less than the movie’s infamous “bottomless” party.

The screenwriters reserve special pride for this scene, which transpires at the sprawling Florida home of a friend of Harold and Kumar’s. This rare delivery on a trailer’s titillation — featuring more casually exposed pudenda than the finest art-house pornography — represented a victory over something scarier to some filmmakers than Guantanamo Bay: the Motion Picture Association of America.

“Nothing was cut. The truth is that Jon and I are students of nudity in movies and R-rated comedies, so we know what people have gotten away with before,” Mr. Schlossberg said, barely able to contain his glee. “I like the idea of them watching the movie and almost snapping their pencils: ‘Argh, they almost crossed the line!’ But we come at it from a comedic place, not a ‘Skinemax’ porno place. And when comedy is coming from a good place, whether it’s the bottomless party or the racial jokes, things that are offensive usually get by.”