By definition, hangovers are not funny. Actually, they're usually the opposite of funny.

Your head hurts, your stomach's queasy, your mouth is dry, your hair is greasy and protruding from your scalp in a number of unfortunate directions and you smell like you bathed in a tub of ashes.

None of this brings a smile to my face, at least when I picture myself as the victim.

In terms of medical conditions, a movie titled "The Morning Sickness" should be just as funny as one titled "The Hangover."

Although we all know that watching a woman spew into a circular porcelain figure in her bathroom isn't nearly as funny as watching a pantless chubby guy peeing on a Las Vegas hotel room bathroom floor five feet away from a growling tiger.

Score one for the film centering around excessive drinking among friends -- or more accurately, the consequences of said behavior.

Director Todd Phillips knows a thing or two about male bonding films -- he's been involved with the likes of "Road Trip," "Old School," and "Starsky & Hutch." With "The Hangover," he does alcohol-fueled friendship better than he's ever done.

Doug is about to tie the knot, and he's leaving bachelorhood as all men with friends rich enough to manage financing such a trip do -- he's going to Vegas, baby.

Doug's friends are a mixed bag of characters from different walks of life. Alan (comedian Zach Galifianakis) isn't so much a friend as he is a brother of the bride-to-be. He's an odd duck who is not supposed to be within 200 feet of either schools or Chuck E. Cheese. He's also the chubby pantless guy.

Phil (Bradley Cooper) is the cool, cocky one of the bunch whose own unfulfilling marriage has left him skeptical of the whole "I do" thing. "You're gonna start dying a little each day," he tells Doug of his post-wedding life.

Stu (Ed Helms, aka "Andy" from "The Office") is the nerdy, spineless dentist who lies to his longtime girlfriend about the Vegas trip (he says they're going to the more sophisticated, decidedly less sinful Napa Valley) just so he can avoid the inevitable fight such an unwise, immature decision on his part would bring.

Doug (Justin Bartha) is the bachelor who his buddies lose after a night resulting in the mother of all hangovers.

So although they do find the previously mentioned striped maneater, a rooster prancing about, a smoking chair cushion and a human infant in the closet -- all within their $4,200 a night suite, they're unable to find the man they're supposed to be supporting as he prepares to make the next step in his life.

Oops.

Unfortunately, they can't rely upon their memories to help them determine his whereabouts because they can't remember a darn thing about the night.

D'oh!

To find him, they follow a hilariously unlikely string of clues they come across, including a hospital visit, a trip to a quickie-marriage chapel and a painful encounter with a naked Asian man locked in the trunk of their Mercedes.

Just when we're convinced things couldn't get any more random, we find Mike Tyson in their hotel room singing along to a Phil Collins tune.

It's enough to have anyone wonder aloud, "Man, what happened last night?"

Despite all the insanely stupid plot points in "The Hangover," the movie also manages to capture some of the comic magic that can only occur when a group of guys put the women and children to bed, head out on the town and try to relive a few of their glory days.

As "The Hangover" boys figure out, however, it takes a lot longer to recover now than it did back then.

Joel Sensenig is news editor of the Review Times. Being the fine, upstanding and respectable young man he is, his accounts of hangovers included herein are based purely upon his friends' accounts of theirs.