Albert Brooks’ Supposedly Edgy Film on Islamic Humor Plays It Safe

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World” doesn’t. Albert Brooks’ new, supposedly edgy film begins with the government asking him to head up a fictitious mission to explore what makes people laugh. Perhaps if we really knew the people we were fighting, goes the theory, we’d find a way […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World” doesn’t.

Albert Brooks’ new, supposedly edgy film begins with the government asking him to head up a fictitious mission to explore what makes people laugh. Perhaps if we really knew the people we were fighting, goes the theory, we’d find a way not to fight at all. So, says the State Department, we’d like you to go to India.


Isn’t that a predominantly Hindu country, Brooks asks.

“They’ve got 150 million Muslims living there,” Fred Dalton Thompson snaps. “That enough for you?”

Well, no, actually, not when there are 850 million non-Muslims living there, too. If we’re going to accept the movie’s culture-clash premise, Brooks’ character has to go to a hostile, predominantly Islamic country. If you want to make a daring comedy, you actually have to dare something.

Instead Brooks plays it safe, making the film a movie not about Islam, but India. (Although a trip to Pakistan is mentioned, it takes up only a few scenes in the script and was shot somewhere else.) In real-life interviews, he has downplayed this, saying that as a Jew, he’d hardly be welcomed in Saudi Arabia anyway.

That may be true, but isn’t Saudi Arabia _ and Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran and the Palestinians _ really the subject here? And if you can’t visit them, couldn’t some other sandy spot be pressed into service? Those old Valentino pictures didn’t have to go to the Middle East just to find a few dunes for the sheik to stride across.

It’s not just a question of practical bravery but artistic courage. In the past, Brooks’ films _ “Real Life,” “Lost in America,” “Defending Your Life” _ had a willingness to include uncomfortable moments. Unlike Woody Allen, Brooks’ heroes not only never asked us to accept their flaws, they never admitted they had them. The humor came from their own obtuseness, and you can draw a line from Brooks’ shameless noodges to Larry David’s spoiled princes.

But once Brooks’ new film announces its supposedly risky subject _ and the title alone got the film dropped by one studio _ it runs as far away from it as he can. Instead of making a film about Islamic fundamentalists or American foreign policy, he saves most of his jokes for outsourcing and pointed shoes. A subplot about his secretary, Sheetal Sheth, and her jealous Iranian boyfriend goes nowhere.

There are a few silly jokes, but none of them is quite as silly as the film’s premise. Actually, it’s not hard at all to look for comedy in the Muslim world; one only need see some Muslim movies. Last year, one of the main characters in “The Syrian Bride” was an actor on an Arab sitcom; a recent issue of Variety included a review of “The Long Night,” a Pakistani remake of, of all things, “After Hours.” The present is a lot more complex than Brooks imagines.

Yet “Looking for Comedy” is stuck in the past, its melodramatic music, spy-vs.-spy subplot and what-the-world-needs-now message suggesting nothing so much as one of those old Cold War comedies that insisted, gosh, if Russians and Americans could only really talk, they’d realize they weren’t so different after all. But the worlds of the secular West and the fundamentalist East are different, and drastically so.


And a thin comedy like this _ a comedy so secretly scared of its own subject it won’t even confront it _ is far more a symptom of the problem than a solution.

(Rated PG-13. The film contains some mildly strong language and scenes of drug use.)

MO RNS END

(Stephen Whitty is film critic for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!