Zahn and Kudrow aren't the only animal showmen here. The Firesign Theater's Phil Proctor returns as the drunken monkey whose every appearance is a hoot. Jacob Vargas does a funny Frito Bandito turn as Pepito, a chameleon who can't manage to change his color. One of the funniest strokes is presenting the woodland creatures not as helpless little furries but as having organized themselves like a crime family. Director and sometime actor Richard Sarafian plays the beaver, who is don of the forest. Michael Rapaport is the raccoon who serves as his underling. ("When the Beaver offers you a fish, you take the fish!" he warns Dolittle at one point, enforcing proper respect for his don.) And Andy Dick as a weasel who witnesses some corporate nefariousness is funnier than he has ever been in person.

By contrast, Murphy is the human straight man. But watching "Dr. Dolittle 2" provides something of a revelation into his style of comedy. Watching Richard Pryor play nice in the lousy comedies he was shoehorned into was always a miserable experience because they gave him no room to cut loose. But those restraints work wonders for Murphy, and it's not just that he's found better vehicles than Pryor managed.

Left to his own devices, as in his early stand-up routines, Murphy was like a third-rate imitation of Pryor. Where Pryor's flights of obscenity came out in a stream of lyrical rage, a testament to the demons he was wrestling with, Murphy's profanity was calculated, ugly. He was less a man beset by demons than someone who knew he could get laughs with his misogynist and homophobic routines (which, in fairness, he has since apologized for). Working within the confines of a family comedy, Murphy is able to remind us how truly funny he can be.

His work in the "Dolittle" movies isn't the comic tour de force he gave in the two "Nutty Professor" pictures. Those movies worked not just on their own terms but as insights into Murphy's attempts to remake himself. If roly-poly Sherman Klump was the sweetie he wanted to be, Buddy Love represented the persona of the mean-spirited, vulgarian jive artist that Murphy had used for his early success. The movies were the honest expression of a comic trying to change without losing what made him funny. It worked. Murphy's impersonations of the Klump family (particularly the oversexed grandmother and Sherman's sweet, doting mama) add up to some of the most brilliant comic acting in recent movies.

As Dr. Dolittle, Murphy is essentially playing second banana to the animals, but he assays that function with becoming self-effacement. Here, he also gets to parody the macho stance that was often so insufferable in his stand-up routines. Dolittle is the only man in a house of women, his lawyer wife, Lisa (Kristen Wilson, who has a warm, canny presence), and his two daughters, Charisse and Maya. As such, whenever he tries to play the husband or father throwing his weight around, he's immediately called on his masculine bull.

These bits give Murphy a chance to parody the hotheaded macho anger that his comedy once seemed to embody. And it also allows one of his least-remarked qualities to come forth -- his almost prissy side. When he's admonishing Charisse for the sexy dancing he catches her doing alone in her room and imitates it with popped eyes and pursed lips, he's like the black father as Church Lady, a combination of paternal authority and spinsterish shock.

The animals, though, are the stars here, and after a while their one-liners and comebacks seem natural. The six Johnny Weismuller-Maureen O'Sullivan "Tarzan" movies gave us African jungles full of animals as acrobatic vaudevillians. The "Dolittle" movies give us animals as the comics who warmed up for those acts. It's a world where everyone is competing to be the funniest smartass on four legs. Walking down the street after I saw the movie, I passed a Chihuahua and realized that I was bracing for it to make some wisecrack. I'm still disappointed that it didn't.

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