Adam Sandler never goes for the easy laugh. “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” is a highbrow treatise on the indignity of our current marriage laws. But it also takes great pleasure in making fun of the gays, fatsoes, Asians, and stupid hotties adrift in its fictional, equal-opportunity world.

“Chuck and Larry” is a comedy that tries to package the gay lifestyle in a funny and nonthreatening format for straight audiences. Like most of Mr. Sandler’s early work, the film follows an overgrown child who learns an important lesson and gets the girl along the way. But most of the humor is made at the expense of gay characters or perceived gay personality traits. And though it deigns to be a message movie promoting gay partnership, there is, for one example, a distinct fear of same-sex kissing in the film. Not surprisingly, then, the attempted morality of the film only undercuts its childish attempts at humor and condescends to its audience.

Mr. Sandler plays Chuck, a New York City firefighter so entrenched in his lust for beautiful women that he tries to get two sisters to make out in his first moments onscreen. His best friend and colleague Larry (Kevin James) is a widower struggling to reconcile his love for his children with the inherent danger in putting out large fires. Due to an accounting problem, Larry cannot guarantee his life insurance will go to his children if he dies in the line of duty. When he finds a loophole in the tax code to provide for his children, he approaches Chuck to collect on a favor he is owed. He asks Chuck to pose as his domestic partner, a set-up that Chuck regrettably refers to as becoming “paper faggots.”

In an effort (as if it were needed) to reaffirm Chuck’s inherent heterosexuality, director Dennis Dugan puts Chuck in bed with five lovely ladies plus his hot doctor for the scene in which Larry comes calling to turn his friend temporarily gay. The pair proceeds to jump through an increasingly difficult variety of hoops to prove their homosexuality to the city, which is cracking down on heterosexuals trying to game the system for benefits.

Along the way, the city hires a beautiful lawyer named Alex McDonough (Jessica Biel) to sit next to the non-gay pair in court and tempt Chuck into blowing his cover, among other things.

Despite his initial homophobia, Chuck quickly learns that homosexuals are people, too. But as soon as he pretends to turn gay, he falls in love with Alex, whose intellectual appeal is easily distinguished from all the other scantily clad beauties in the film (she wears glasses sometimes).

Messrs. Sandler and James have a genuine rapport that brings a heart to this buddy film, but the jokes (written, astonishingly, by “Sideways” and “About Schmidt” scribe Alexander Payne, along with Jim Taylor and Barry Fanaro) are better suited to an outdated 1950s comedy than any film today.

Larry’s likely gay son Eric (Cole Morgen) is first mocked for his penchant for show tunes, but later he’s meant to inspire empathy. Duncan, an intimidating black fireman played by Ving Rhames, becomes an effeminate softy as soon as Chuck and Larry teach him it’s okay to be gay, while Rob Schneider, as the man hired to marry the couple, struts out the worst Asian stereotype since Mickey Rooney played Mr. Yunioshi in 1961’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Only Dan Aykroyd gets interesting laughs with his role as the department’s fire captain, who is sympathetic to Chuck and Larry’s cause but is also convinced that they will be caught — and drag him down with them. Meanwhile, as the folk singer Dave Matthews camps it up as a gay store clerk, a fat man farts in Mr. Sandler’s face, and David Spade appears in fishnets, the humor in “Chuck and Larry” is increasingly tired and lazy.

Trotted out for judgment are the trusty villains of such fare — picketing Christians, homophobic parents, and a curmudgeonly Steve Buscemi, who has the burden of simultaneously finding physical proof that Chuck and Larry are a gay couple and hating the entire gay populace.

Satire works best when there is an appreciation, or at least an understanding, of the other side. But in “Chuck and Larry,” everyone who stands in the way of this fake gay union is a homophobic idiot. Even the government officials who are trying to prevent fraud are secretly gay-bashers.

Well intentioned as it may be, “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” condescends where it should elucidate and offends where it should amuse. The question is: If it relies so heavily on mocking its target audience, then who exactly is going to pay to see it?

mkeane@nysun.com