Is schmucks too much?

Either way,Paramount and DreamWorks have slapped the word onto a movie that is directed by Jay Roach,who knows his way around crude titles. Roachs last two films were Meet the Fockers and Austin Powers in Goldmember,and he tiptoed toward the brink of an international ratings problem with his Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,which used British slang for sex.

The current movie is inspiredit is not a remake,says a spokesman for Roachby Francis Vebers 1998 comedy of manners in which polished,well-heeled Frenchmen hold regular dinners where they compete over who can bring the biggest buffoon as his guest. The French title also includes a term that has a sometimes vulgar meaning yet can be translated as Dinner for Idiotsthough it was actually released in English as The Dinner Game.

A few weeks ago,Debbie Schlussela kind of all-purpose film critic,political commentator and Web opinion spinnertook issue not just with the trailer promoting Dinner for Schmucks,about which she wrote on her website,debbieschlussel.com,it looks like utter garbage, but also with its use of Yiddish. The more correct title would have been Dinner for Schlemiels, Schlussel insisted,if the filmmakers were trying to describe the geeky behaviour displayed by Carell in the pratfall-filled trailer.

The Online Etymology Dictionary would seem to agree,as a schlemiel is described as an awkward,clumsy person,while the sort of contemptible person referred to in the title would seem more like the characters,one of them played by Paul Rudd,who act like jerks by giving the dinner.

Actually,Carells character has a bit of the shmendrik about him because he seems quite stupid,and he is a hopeless shlimazl,with obvious bad luck. And yet in the modern,Americanised usage,in which the word dumb is often dropped in front of the movie titles core vulgarity,well,he does it justice.

In a brief exchange of e-mail messages last week,Roach said he was not quite sure who among the films writers and producers came up with the title,which was in place when he joined the project. Other titles were considered,he said,but none came close to fitting the story better.

Be that as it may,the worlds pop-cultural apparatus is now left to deal with a word that was once regarded as so vulgar as to be taboo in the home of the Yiddish language aficionado Leo Rosten,according to his 1968 treatise,The Joys of Yiddish. The comic Lenny Bruce said he was arrested for using it onstage. According to an online account,NBC once banned the word from a Saturday Night Live skit,written by Al Franken,in which Lincoln was to use it in addressing Richard M. Nixon. Representatives of NBC and the Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels would not confirm the incident when contacted recently. Liz Fischer,one of the NBC representatives,said the network had cleared advertising for Roachs new movie to run after 9 p.m.,when younger viewers are presumably not watching.

Only recently,Warner Brothers transformed its police-buddy film A Couple of Dicks into Cop Out after being advised that the networks,detecting a sexually oriented double-entendre,would restrict advertising of the original title.How Paramount will translate its new title when releasing Roachs movie in,say,Turkey,where it is set to open on September 24,is not clear.