Some of the best humor, certainly some of the best Jewish humor, is predicated on honest self-observation. Maybe we could use more irreverent but culturally meaningful output on race relations. “You People,” written by Jonah Hill and Kenya Barris, pretends to be such an effort. But really, it is just a millennial version of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” — which is to say, intellectually, emotionally, and artistically vacuous.

“You People” is the story of a love-starved Jewish man named Ezra, played by Hill, and his black Muslim fiancé, Amira, played by the talented Lauren London. Can they make it work? Well, not if the parents get in the way.

We learn very early in the movie that Jews over the age of 40 are either sexual deviants or drooling idiots, American Jewish success is grounded in generational wealth rather than work and tradition, and Jewish culture — insofar as it even exists — is based on materialism. We first meet Ezra’s family at a Yom Kippur service, where older congregants played by Hal Linden (born, Harold Lipshitz, a child of poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrants) and the once-great Richard Benjamin act like depraved nincompoops. And when Ezra is set up by a woman from his family’s temple, she is, naturally, turned off by his lack of concern over money and status.

Amira does not harbor any of these greedy apprehensions. She encourages Ezra to try to quit his job in “finance” — boy, everyone hates those guys! — to pursue his dream of being a podcaster. Ezra’s business partner, an androgynous lesbian woman of color, is, unlike his bumbling parents, a font of deep wisdom and reliable advice. Ezra, the product of privilege, listens to his partner’s pseudointellectual identitarian gibberish and learns great lessons.

It is, of course, the parents who make it impossible for the couple to move forward with their wedding plans. Ezra is from a guilt-ridden Jewish family, whose members obsequiously and ham-fistedly fall over themselves to show how open-minded they are about Amira. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays the bumbling mom, Shelley. She is perpetually offending Amira and her family by either good-intentioned overreacting to imaginary racist slights or by saying things she shouldn’t. David Duchovny, who plays Ezra’s dad, a hip-hop-loving doctor, doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to say anything interesting. They are, probably like you, racist without even knowing it.

On the other hand, Amira’s parents, Akbar and Fatima, are dignified and successful. The couple, played by Eddie Murphy and Nia Long, also happen to be big fans of antisemitic preacher Louis Farrakhan. This could have been a funny premise if the movie hadn’t been so cowardly. But antisemitism is treated as nothing more than an eccentric outlook. While Ezra’s parents keep making far-fetched faux pas about race, Amira’s parents praise a Holocaust denier and accuse Jews of being slave traders. These two positions are treated as equally odious. (If producers really wanted to script a movie about similarly offensive positions, they would pair a family who adulates the man who said Hitler was “a very great man” with a family of neo-Nazis. One doubts audiences would accept that any Nick Fuentes fans were, though somewhat flawed, basically decent and accepting people.)

All the characters, of course, are just ludicrous cartoon composites of angry social media cliches. The writers were so lazy they have Akbar take Ezra to a black neighborhood pick-up game to embarrass him (spoiler: portly 5’7″ Jews can apparently jump). Any real meditation on race, especially a funny one, would take work.

Hill and London have some pretty good chemistry. And if the movie focused on the struggles of building a life despite cultural differences, it might have been interesting. Instead, “You People” — which I watched because the preview featured perhaps the only funny scene in the movie — is just aggressively offensive. Not because it insults us, but because it pretends to take on the thorny questions of race when in reality it reinforces crude and idiotic stereotypes that divide us.

Now, I would spoil the end of this alleged romantic comedy, but just envision the most cliched third act possible. On his podcast, Ezra finally makes an impassioned speech in which he claims black and white people can never truly understand each other. It’s bad enough that the lesson of the movie is that immutable physical characteristics should define people, but, let’s just say, the movie doesn’t even have the guts to take its premise to a logical conclusion.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News and radio talk shows across the country. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.