The chief disappointment of Albert Brooks’ latest film, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, is that it almost never delivers on its promises. The provocative title is lying to you before you even get into the theatre: despite appearances, this is not a documentary, nor is it really about looking for comedy, and it’s only incidentally about the Muslim world.
Brooks wrote and directed the movie, and plays himself in the lead role, but the resulting movie has so little personality that it could have been written by a committee of greeting-card writers.
The premise is priceless: Brooks, the over-the-hill nebbishy L.A. Jewish comedian, is recruited by the U.S. State department to spend a month in India and Pakistan writing a 500-page report on “what makes the Muslims laugh,” to aid the cause of East-West relations. Having no other employment prospects, and with the government dangling a Medal of Freedom in exchange for the jaunt, Brooks shrugs and goes along.
It’s easy to imagine that such a plot could lend itself to some particularly dark, edgy, or acidic humour, or that the comedy would have a sharp political point to make. Instead, there is a pair of bumbling State Department aides who bungle their assignments, humorous misunderstandings because of the language gap, and recurring jokes about an Indian call centre next door to Brooks’ office.
A montage of Brooks and his newly hired Indian secretary, Maya, interviewing passersby in the street mostly consists of Brooks telling hoary borscht-belt jokes and then looking pained when no one laughs.
An extended sequence in which Brooks puts on a free comedy show for the natives wrings some laughs out of the comedian’s desperate attempts to get the slightest chuckle from his audience, but beyond a genuinely funny bit with a ventriloquist’s dummy, the scene becomes every bit as painful to watch for the real audience as it does for the onscreen one.
The scene sums up the central untruth of the movie’s title: it has nothing to do with looking for Muslim comedy, and everything to do with exporting tired American music-hall jokes, which we quickly learn are no funnier in Bangalore than they were in the Catskills. Even when Brooks sneaks across the Pakistani border to actually meet Pakistani comics, he is the one who ends up performing for them. A grimly funny scene at the offices of the Al-Jazeera network helps, but can’t save the flagging plot
Now, it’s unfair to judge a film based on what it could have been (imagine what Larry David could have done with this premise, or Chris Rock, or Stephen Colbert, for that matter), rather than what it is. But the setup of the movie, and the story that actually happens, are so different that it’s hard not to feel cheated. If the story had been compelling, however, that wouldn’t have mattered. Instead, there are limp gags about cellphones and Polish jokes. Keep looking.
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
Written and directed by Albert Brooks
Rating: VV
