Comedy Quotient: ‘Chicken’ Feed

It’s astounding what can happen when the media get wind of a titillating tidbit of gossip on an awfully slow news day.

Various versions abound, but this particular story appears to have started a few years ago at Yale University, where a small group of bored students used to gather semi-regularly to eat greasy chicken, drink cheap beer and watch dirty movies. But this being the Ivy League, an effort to attach some greater significance to these coed sessions soon surfaced, and thus the Porn ‘n Chicken club was born.

Word spread surreptitiously, the “meetings” got larger, and the underground attention fed the group’s randy ambitions. It was the P&C;’s decision to cast Yale students in its own porn movie that brought the media running, and Time magazine, the New York Times and a host of other august news institutions breathlessly weighed in on what was transpiring at our then new president’s alma mater.

The porn movie was never made, but unfortunately, another film was: the crass Comedy Channel version of the Yale tale, “Porn ‘n Chicken” (Sunday at 10 p.m.).

This flat, leering effort is the cable outfit’s first foray into original movies, and one can only hope for better things the second time around. As P&C; principals Polly and Quentin, Angela Goethals (the WB sitcom “Do Over”) and Alex Burns (“National Lampoon’s Van Wilder”) manage to stand out, but the acting is generally charmless, and the romantic and political subplots are more tiresome than involving. The meager scattering of halfway decent lines (“Word of our deeds is spreading like chlamydia”) rattle around like a handful of marbles in a trash can.

The lesson may be that while truth is often stranger than fiction, it’s not necessarily any funnier.