Legend has it that US President George HW Bush cost himself the 1992 election when he asserted that American families should be more like The Waltons and less like The Simpsons. More than two decades after Bush’s career ended in failure, The Simpsons is still going strong and as irreverent as ever.

The animated series has even become somewhat popular with conservatives as no matter how badly patriarch Homer behaves, no matter how many better options his wife has, the family always stays together. Li Xinman’s romantic comedy “One Night Stand” also contains humor that prissier members of the audience may disapprove of: the first scene sees a curtain fall in a sperm bank and later a table full of dinner guests find themselves accidentally eating a baby’s diahrreah. However, it comes to a deeply conservative conclusion about marriage and whether or not a woman can have it all.

In the early scenes, the two main characters are established: Zhuo Xiaoxin (Jiang Yiyan) is a high-flying alpha woman who is determined to have a baby without getting attached to a member of a gender she has little time for; Zha Yi (Zheng Kai) is a formidable 28 year-old pick-up artist who boasts that he never sleeps with the same woman twice.

By the time the irresistible force meets the immovable object, it is easy to predict what the characters’ arcs will be. After Zhuo takes the initiative in dragging Zha to a hotel room, she pulls off the condom so she can have a child with the genes of a handsome man with a high IQ.

The plot is then driven by Zhuo’s attempts to reinvent himself as a responsible father and the determination of Zha, who happens to be a black belt in Taekwondo, to stave off any attempt to take her baby away. After Zha’s family take her to court, Zhuo finds that it’s impossible in today’s China for a woman to have it all unless she lets a man into her life.

The humor is low-brow but what makes the film worth watching is the snappy dialogue and believable characters. Both Zha and Zhuo are archetypes of the post-80’s generation and much of the comedy derives from their clashes with their older family members.

Like the “Carry On” films made in Britain during the 1960s, it is raunchy but ultimately conventional. The message is wise in saying that when one moves toward one good thing one moves away from another (e.g. you cannot be a Mother Goose with a happy brood and have a high-flying career, you cannot have the flexibility of a 28 year-old playboy and the stability of a family man), but it shows that like America in the 1930s and 40s, China is determined to promote conservative values through its cinema.

It is all well and good when a film contains the message “focus on the family.” However, one hopes a director in mainland China will one day have the courage to make a movie that says “focus on your own damn family.”