Hardy-har-har? Hardly ever in "The Honeymooners" at hand.

You wanna grab its perpetrators by their collective necktie and -- pow! right in the kisser! They should be going on a trip to the moon for making or, rather, remaking such a mess of the greatest-ever situation comedy.

	Jonathan Hession, Paramount Pictures "The Honeymooners" remake stars Gabrielle Union, left, as Alice, Cedric the Entertainer as Ralph, Michael Epps as Ed and Regina Hall as Trixie. Click photo for larger image. "The Honeymooners" Rating: Rated PG-13 for innuendo and rude humor. Starring: Cedric the Entertainer, Mike Epps, Gabrielle Union, John Leguizamo. Director: John Schultz.

The overall problem is that the "sits" lack "com," blame for which lies at the eight clumsy feet of the four -- count 'em, four -- co-writers (Danny Jacobson, David Sheffield, Barry Blaustein and Don Rhymer).

The original CBS-TV series was black and white. This one is all-black, with plenty of talent to potentially pull it off.

Cedric the Entertainer stars in the legendary Jackie Gleason role of Ralph Cramden, a portly Port Authority bus driver with an inexhaustible supply of harebrained get-rich-quick schemes dependent on harebrained neighbor Ed Norton's collaboration. That likewise legendary schlemiel, the comic-foil sewer worker immortalized by Art Carney in the series, is taken here by Mike Epps.

The African-American Alice, Ralph's long-suffering wife, is played by Gabrielle Union in the shadow of Audrey Meadows' definitively droll, dour original. Her prettier and perkier pal Trixie, Ed's wife, is Regina Hall.

Getting that beloved quartet from small to large screen should have been a no-brainer: Just stick to the blue-collar reality and simplicity -- structure plus empathy! -- that made such original magic.

But nooooo .... Director John Schultz and the script-scribblers indicted above surrender right off the bat, discarding our characters' low-income essence and the winsome plainness of their digs and clothes. The girls are gussied up way beyond their waitress' means and busied with a lame subplot involving sleazy developer Eric Stoltz instead of comically complicating (and later morally correcting) the guys' off-course American dreams.

The guys (and the film itself), meanwhile, get preoccupied with the even sillier and unfunnier business of training Iggy, an abandoned greyhound they've stumbled across, for "the big dog race" that Schultz foolishly lets dominate instead of decorate the dynamics. Imagine Jackie Gleason giving half his camera time to a canine!

Our consolation prize for that, however, is John Leguizamo's inspired turn as the crazed hustler-trainer in charge of turning Iggy into a champ so that Ralph will win the money so that he can replace what he filched from the savings account so that Alice and Trixie can buy the duplex so that ....

You get the idea.

But so many missed opportunities! I like everything about Cedric -- "Barbershop," "The Original Kings of Comedy," "Big Momma's House" -- except his surname. (What do they call his wife at the beauty parlor? Mrs. the Entertainer? It seems cumbersome.)

He does his best to keep some classic suggestions of Gleason without imitating him but gets little help from his director. Just when a sight gag of Ralph and Ed rap-dancing for street change starts getting good, Schultz lops it off for a montage of their other desperate fund-raising efforts -- all of which are funny, none of which are exploited.

Instead, we get greyhounds. Greyhounds aren't a riot, Alice. And, baby, this "Honeymooners" isn't the greatest.