It usually takes a comedic franchise a few outings to warm to up a “going to jail” installment. Sure, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay got the irrepressible stoners to America’s most infamous detention center on their second journey to the multiplexes, but for the most part, especially when the films are buoyed by a comedic performer whose brand is based around a single outrageous, larger than life comedic persona, you have to work up to the jailhouse installment.

Tyler Perry’s sixth outing as a feature film director, Madea Goes to Jail, which opens today (not screened for critics), takes him into this territory as he sends his signature character to the slammer, but the most treasured entry in this oh so small subgenre certainly belongs to John Cherry III. Who the hell is John Cherry III? He directed 1990’s Ernest Goes to Jail, the fourth proper theatrical film to feature the late Kentucky-born comedian Jim Varney’s Ernest P. Worrell, the insatiably stupid blue hat and vest-wearing bank janitor who would go on to be the subject of Trauth dairy milk commercials and an increasingly inept series of movies that bottomed out with 1997’s straight-to-video Ernest Goes to Africa.

The title’s of Ernest’s first film, 1987’s Ernest Goes to Camp, tells you exactly how you one should go about approaching these films; once you give in to their myriad camp possibilities, the rehabilitation of these films becomes pretty easy. At a brisk 78 minutes, Ernest Goes to Jail is the series’ gold standard, a deeply satisfying doppelganger narrative presented as a brisk set of increasingly bizarre, absurd and positively supernatural comedic set pieces, often involving Ernest’ inability to master cleaning equipment but gradually progressing to his ability to fly and fire electric bolts at prison guards and escapees alike. The film requires you to check your disbelief at the door and perhaps leave it in another country.

The plot lands Ernest in jail by conjuring an evil, murderous prison inmate twin named Nash who is introduced making life a living hell for an Elias Koteas lookalike (he’s not credited but I could swear it’s him, the same year he played Casey Jones in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) who owes him money. When he discovers the unsuspecting Ernest on a tour of the jail while doing jury duty, Nash has his Eraserhead-coiffed henchmen Lyle (ex heavyweight boxer Randall “Tex” Cobb, brilliant) knock him over the head. Nash switches clothes with Ernest and starts planning to rob/blow up the Nashville depositor where Ernest barely hangs on to a job while Ernest, who steadfastly refuses dread and melancholy, adjusts to life in prison and plots his own escape.

Masterfully embracing an unrefined, go-for-broke-because-we-have-nothing-to-lose aesthetic, Ernest Goes to Jail completely abandons the rhythms of normalcy and realism that even most Hollywood comedies, ridiculous as they are, have trouble abandoning, leaving them stale before the opening credits are even unpacked and confused in their ambitions soon after. Ernest Goes to Jail has no such problems. Leaping headlong into awkward dialogue, overwrought lighting, insano camera movements and terribly obvious set ups with heedless aplomb, Cherry and his collaborators’ film grammar is constantly amused with its own rudimentary grasp and never once asks you to accept anyone in Ernest’s universe as anything more than mere “types” to be comedically exploited. These include his incompetent security guard buddies (Gailard Sartain and Bill Byrge as Bobby, who has a face that’s straight outta David Lynch), his perpetual sorta love interest Charlotte (Barbara Tyson, oddly going as Barbara Bush during W’s daddies’ administration) and a prison villain that looks like post-steroid Barry Bonds.

Madea, an brusque stereotype of the churchgoing, gun toting, overweight and never satisfied working class black elderly woman, has proved to be Perry’s most significant contribution to popular culture, but Varney’s Ernest, who seems immune to electricity and gives a rousing speech about transcending death after he/Nash is transferred to death row, truly delivers on comedy’s raison d’ etre: to give us a brief respite from our one-way existential ticket toward being glorified worm food.