“Joy Ride” is an Asian-American “Hangover”-style comedy with two small-town best friends named Audrey (Ashley Park, “Emily in Paris”) and Lolo (comedian Sherry Cola) traveling to Beijing with a couple of friends, where they get into some funny and nasty business. “Joy Ride” is not just funny. It’s an exercise in comedy cultural payback and an examination of Asian-American anger. Just check out the flashback in which adopted Audrey and Lolo first meet as children in a Washington state playground where Lolo busts a white, racist bully boy right in the chops.

As my colleagues have also reported, the audience at the screening I attended burst into spontaneous applause at the sight of this. For my part, I do not understand why, after the enormous 2018 success of “Crazy Rich Asians” which was co-written by the “Joy Ride”’s first-time director Adele Lim, it hasn’t spawned a dozen knockoffs by now. Lim co-wrote “Joy Ride” with Cherry Chevapravatdumrong (TV’s “Family Guy”) and Teresa Hsiao (“Awkwafina is Nora from Queens”), and the comedy is strong, consistent and directed at a lot of presumptions, outright racist traditions and sex.

Joining Audrey and Lolo on their journey are Audrey’s college roommate-turned-actor Kat (Stephanie Hsu, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”) and Lolo’s odd, singleton cousin Deadeye (nonbinary comic Sabrina Wu). How much trouble can four mismatched Asian-Americans get into in Beijing?

You are about to find out. The reason for the trip is that Audrey, an overachieving lawyer, has been sent to Beijing to complete a business deal. What her employers may not know is that Audrey, who was raised by white parents, does not speak Mandarin and must bring her nutty, trouble-making Chinese-speaking friend Lolo along with her. One of the funniest sequences in the film involves a quantity of drugs the travelers must hide in intimate spaces or ingest on a train to avoid getting arrested in Communist China on drug charges (OK,  maybe not so funny a subject). Meredith Hanger is good as the deranged drug smuggler, who forces the women to help get rid of the drugs. They end up off the train and stuck in the middle of nowhere (the film was shot in Vancouver).

Much of the humor is raunchy (i.e., a K-pop cover of Cardi B’s “WAP”) and some it can be cruel, which is not surprising since the film was produced by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen of “Knocked Up” and “Superbad” fame. “Joy Ride” turns a bit sentimental when Audrey is persuaded to seek her birth mother. Hsu’s Kat is a semi-successful actress in Beijing about to marry a conservative Chinese actor. He believes his future wife is a virgin, while her girlfriends know that is – shall we say? – hardly the case. If you found the jokes in Rogen and Goldberg’s “Sausage Party” (2016) tiresome and at times witless, get ready for the female genitalia equivalent in “Joy Ride,” although some of these are both raunchy and hilarious. If you liked “Bridesmaids” and “Girls Trip,” you are going to enjoy this equally gross and entertaining exercise in Asian-American bonding amid dislocation and sexual and illegal substance shenanigans. Wu, who was named New Face of Comedy at 2022’s Just for Laughs comedy festival, has a remarkably unique style and a probable big future ahead.

(“Joy Ride” contains some violence and pervasive profanity, lewd language)

Rated R. At AMC Boston Common, AMC South Bay and suburban theaters. Grade: B