IF ALL IT TOOK TO make a great comic movie was a great comic idea, the writer-director-actor Albert Brooks would be Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Frank Capra rolled into one. No one has ever come up with catchier and more enticing comic concepts than Brooks.
Consider: A middle-aged man with commitment issues moves back in with his septuagenarian mother to find out what went wrong with him (Mother). Two spoiled yuppies who decide to “drop out from society” lose all their money in a Las Vegas gambling spree and have to make ends meet in an Arizona trailer park (Lost in America). A man dies young and finds himself on trial in purgatory for the crime of having given in to his neurotic fears (Defending Your Life). A documentary filmmaker panicked that his footage of a middle-class family is just too boring sets their house on fire to get some drama going (Real Life).
And now he has made a movie called Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World with another brilliant conceit: He, Albert Brooks, is asked by the State Department–in the person of former senator Fred Thompson–to find out what makes Muslims chuckle. Brooks, who is at loose ends because he fails to get cast in the title role of Penny Marshall’s remake of Harvey, is hesitant to accept Thompson’s offer primarily because Thompson wants him to write a 500-page report. Thompson tells Brooks not to worry because no one will actually read the report, but throughout the picture all Brooks really seems to care about is how many pages his assistant is managing to compile. The only interesting bit of information he collects from a streetcorner interview is that Polish jokes work everywhere on the planet.
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is full of funny bits, terrific one-liners, and comic situations that stay with you long after the movie is over. An Iranian who watches Brooks bomb in his attempt to do standup in front of a Muslim audience is disappointed to discover that, in America, comics do not get punished by the authorities when they put on a bad show. Officials at Al Jazeera offer Brooks a job starring in a new sitcom entitled That Darn Jew. The only way Brooks can get anyone to laugh at his comedy routines is to get them high, and to get high himself. And in the course of trying to get enough material, he nearly starts a war between India and Pakistan. He finally returns home to an eBay-crazed wife, who declares proudly that he is “the Henry Kissinger of comedy” as troops mass along the border in Kashmir.
Brooks’s movies are chock-a-block with great notions. There’s the Past Lives Pavilion in Defending Your Life, where the newly dead are guided through a tour of their karmic journey by a hologram of Shirley MacLaine. In Lost in America, Brooks attempts to convince a casino manager to refund the $100,000 his wife lost at the tables by proposing an ad campaign selling the place as “the casino with a heart.” The has-been screenwriter in The Muse gets a meeting with Spielberg–only it turns out to be Stan Spielberg, Steven’s cousin, who has a tiny office on a studio backlot about a mile-and-a-half from Brooks’s parking space.
But great bits do not great movies make, and like most of Brooks’s other movies, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World seems less like a fully realized piece of work and more like a first draft. Brooks has been making movies for more than 25 years, and with the exception of the splendidly acidic Lost in America, he just can’t pull them off. It’s as though he exhausts himself devising his ingenious concepts on the page and doesn’t have the directorial energy to give them life on the screen. His movies begin with deadpan wit, and then about 40 minutes in, they die. In Looking for Comedy, the movie’s death coincides with a long sequence in which we watch Brooks perform his standup routine from the 1970s in 2005 New Delhi. The material is incredibly unfunny, and yet we are forced to watch every last second of it. Brooks wants us to share the comic’s experience of failing before an audience, but all he does is bore us silly.
Brooks’s great subject is vanity and its destructive effects, and in the manner of Jack Benny, he uses himself as his own target.
John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
