I guess it's the moralist in me, but I'm pleased when good music and good books and good films are popular successes -- and I'm pleased when bad works of art are commercial failures.

Like, for instance, the current movie Evolution, the mind-bogglingly awful science fiction comedy directed by Ivan Reitman and starring David Duchovny and Julianne Moore.

Evolution isn't awful because it has an insanely gratuitous pretext for a female character to take her shirt off, or just because it includes a scene of Duchovny mooning a villainous Army general, or even because its primary leitmotif is…how do I say this…the butt.

No, I expected Evolution to be vulgar and low down and dumb -- but I was hoping for good, well-crafted vulgarity, for some transcendently lowdown comedy. The director, Ivan Reitman, had made Ghostbusters 20 years ago.

In other words, I hoped the movie would be dumb in a smart way. Like the movie Something About Mary, or the 90s MTV animated show Beavis & Butt-head -- or like the astounding new Comedy Central series TV Funhouse.

TV Funhouse is more outrageous and smutty and demented than anything in Evolution, but unlike the movie, it knows what it's doing. It's ambitious -- in its smutty, stupid, lowdown way -- and it actually makes me laugh.

The stars of TV Funhouse are a group of crude animal puppets who mingle on the program with live animals. This is, to use a highfalutin buzzword, transgressive…and it's also surreal, a disturbing and thrilling surrealism.

Then there are the cartoons on TV Funhouse -- like the one about the Harlem Globetrotters playing basketball with Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus, and the one called The Baby, the Immigrant and the Guy on Mushrooms -- in which each of the three characters say nothing but "Ahhhhh…Ohhhh…Ahhhh"

Only one short season of eight episodes has been aired, but TV Funhouse already has an intense cult following, because it's so singular and strange and --in its sublimely stupid way - so funny.

Now, lots of people dismiss all vulgarity as contemptible, not worth watching, trash by definition. But I think it is worth sifting through all art and entertainment -- the respectable as well as the unrespectable, the crass as well as the high-minded - to judge each movie or show or book on its own terms, either good or bad.

Just as Mozart -- that famously vulgar, prankish genius -- had his Salieri -- older, derivative, passionless, 2nd rate -- in comedy today there's Robert Smigel, the creator of TV Funhouse, leaving Ivan Reitman, the director of Evolution, in the dust. And audiences know the difference -- which is why last weekend, Evolution collapsed at the box office.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.