‘Me’ out!

‘Me, Myself & Irene” has something for everyone – to find offensive.

It blithely pokes fun at cops, albinos, nursing mothers, black youth, “little people” and, especially, schizophrenics.

It’s also devastatingly funny.

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill has slammed the comedy – which stars Jim Carrey as a state trooper whose two personalities become romantic rivals for Renée Zellweger’s Irene – as showing “gross ignorance and insensitivity.”

But fans of its creators see their irreverence as being a justifiable means to a hilarious end.

And Peter and Bobby Farrelly, the fraternal writer-director team behind the blockbusters “Dumb and Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary,” would like to convey this message: Lighten up.

“If you cut away our gags and look at our movies, you’d probably be surprised to find they’re almost sickeningly sweet,” says Peter. “We pull some heartstrings.

“People are under the impression that when we sit down to write a comedy, we try to [outdo our previous gags]. But we don’t. The first thing we do is we go out of our way to create a character who’s so lovable that we can hang our gags on him.

“The gags are kind of the easy part. If the audience likes the characters, you can get away with much more.”

In “Irene,” Carrey, the elastic-limbed, rubber-faced comic, shows no shame: He defecates on a lawn, urinates in a shower, threatens small children and sports a milk mustache after being breast-fed (don’t ask).

This, his second go-round with the Farrellys after 1994’s “Dumb and Dumber,” is clearly another star vehicle for the irrepressible Carrey.

“Peter and Bobby are, for me, a breath of fresh air, after taking things seriously [in the Andy Kaufman biopic ‘Man on the Moon’],” he says. “I had such a great experience the first time, I knew I was going to have a great time and just have a lot of laughs.”

Carrey agrees with the Farrellys that “Irene” is harmless fun, despite being littered with a string of gobsmackingly trashy set pieces.

“At the heart of a movie like this, there’s a very good intention,” he says. “And that is to make people not care, and to nail the things that we all do and we all talk about but nobody has the guts to show.”

But even the unflappable Carrey, who launched his career by talking out of his butt as pet detective “Ace Ventura,” initially balked at one of the film’s more outrageous gags, involving a chicken, a pair of handcuffs and a stripped-down cop.

Though Carrey says he hasn’t yet encountered a line he wouldn’t cross, “when I saw the chicken thing in this movie for the first time, I was like ‘Ooh boy. Man, that is pretty tough.’

“But then I saw it with an audience a couple of times, and I was like, ‘OK, go for it. If that’s what the audience wants … “

Giving the audience what it wants will never win the Farrelly brothers an Oscar. But crowd-pleasers like “Mary” – the fourth-highest grossing film of 1998 – have cemented the duo’s reputation as the kings of gross-out comedy.

Ironically, Peter, 43, and Bobby, 42, don’t like that term.

“When people call our comedy gross-out, it annoys us because it’s just a very simplistic way of summing us up and we don’t agree with it,” Peter says.

Bobby: “I think it’s just comedy. What other comedies are going on but those movies? It’s just where comedy is now. It’s a new millennium. It’s hard to make people laugh when, for 50 years on TV and in theaters, there’s been comedy. You can’t tell the same jokes; you need new ones.”

The Cumberland, R.I., natives penned “Me, Myself & Irene” 10 years ago, but Peter says that “finding their voice” with the box-office smash “Dumb and Dumber” gave them the confidence to revisit the script, which he admits was “a very soft, bad spec script.”

“[Initially] nobody wanted to make our first movie,” which was “Dumb and Dumber,” Peter says. “They said, ‘You can’t do this, it won’t go.’ But once New Line did that movie and it worked out, it cut us free.”

Not completely, however. Fox took a certain amount of convincing to give the Farrellys free reign on “Mary.”

After all, that script featured the now-infamous hair gel scene, genitals graphically caught in a zipper and jokes about the mentally disabled.

Tony Cox, the diminutive actor who plays a nunchaku-wielding African-American “little person” in “Irene” and spars with Carrey’s character in one of the film’s most memorable scenes, says he appreciates this type of humor.

“The Farrellys are geniuses at what they do,” he says. “Maybe other directors wouldn’t be able to get away with the things they do, but they know how.”

Cox says he refuses to be the butt of anybody’s jokes. Simply put, he viewed the “Irene” part as one of the rare good roles he gets offered.

“When I first looked at it, I won’t lie, I thought, ‘Man, I wonder what the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] is going to think about this,” Cox laughs. “And then I kept looking at it and I thought, ‘No, it’s going to be fine.”

Despite a string of commercial successes, the Farrelly brothers believe they have yet to make their best movie.

“The great movie we want to make is a movie that has huge laughs and is also a tear-jerker,” Peter says. “When we accomplish that, where you really feel something besides laughing, then we will have succeeded.”