Nuptials married to reality gags

Tonight at 10, NBC debuts “The Real Wedding Crashers,” a “crazy” (my quotes), hidden-camera reality show in which improv actors play obnoxious gate-crashers at an actual wedding.

They cause mishaps, to say nothing of funny flubs and screw-ups. How do they do it? The bride and groom are in on the joke and have in fact invited them to do this to their wedding day. If the argument against legalizing gay marriage is that same-sex unions tarnish the sanctity of holy matrimony between man and woman, “The Real Wedding Crashers” shows what man and woman do with that solemn gift.

They punk their friends and loved ones! And God too! “The Real Wedding Crashers,” a reality-show riff on the hit movie, isn’t as lowbrow as it sounds, nor “crazy” (again my quotes); the comedy, such as it is, veers from slightly inspired to lame.

The slightly inspired: The termite tent around the wedding hall the day before the event. The lame: When the train of the bride’s wedding dress gets “accidentally” caught in the door of an SUV, necessitating an emergency trip to a dry cleaner. “I just did a dress for Bea Arthur, I know what I’m doing,” the ringer-improv guy tells a concerned friend of the groom.

It’s not just that his Asian-sounding accent is lame, it’s that he throws in a Bea Arthur joke. “The Real Wedding Crashers” comes from, among others, the comedy team of Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg, the dudes of MTV’s “Punk’d.”

Sacha Baron Cohens-in-waiting they’re not. The producers are going for “Meet the Parents” zany, or at least “Big Day” hectic, and end up with only a structurally sound arc of gags (the dress bit, the termite bit, the arrest bit) in the old-timey art of hidden-camera pranks.

Their team of comedy actors has some spunk and talent, but the show more closely resembles a commercial for mystery dinner theater, complete with testimonials by real audience members about how fun it all was in the end.

“The Real Wedding Crashers” has come to occupy the same time slot in which NBC began the season with Aaron Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” which fashioned itself a discourse on smart people working to make a dumbed-down medium (TV comedy) a little better.

We’ve become a nation “lobotomized by this country’s most influential industry,” the beleaguered producer played by Judd Hirsch decried in the pilot, where “art is getting its ass kicked” by commerce.

Low ratings spelled “Studio 60’s” doom, and now we arrive at its replacement, a hidden-camera wedding-crasher show. But if I might have a word before you go climbing onto that high horse: “Studio 60” was didactic and overblown, and NBC’s first replacement at 10 was the dismal sellout of a mob drama “The Black Donnellys.” It’s easy to make the argument that reality is wrecking quality; Jake Kasdan says as much in his current feature “The TV Set,” in which David Duchovny plays a TV writer whose voice is beaten down by network suits. They want another hit like their reality show “Slut Wars.”

But it isn’t that simple. I mean, for one thing, “The Real Wedding Crashers” is way better than “Slut Wars.”

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