Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, directed by Albert Brooks, is for American audiences but may not play well in the Muslim World. The ridiculous plot is simple enough to carry many laughs. An out-of-work comedian, Albert Brooks (playing himself), is summoned to Washington by Fred Thompson (playing himself). Thompson, former Senator but now an actor, heads a special commission in the State Department that seeks to find out what might amuse Moslems. He asks Brooks to go to India (which has a lot of Moslems) and Pakistan for a month and then write a 500-page report on his findings, for which he will be paid all per diem expenses plus the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He accepts and is soon on an Air India flight (though all U.S. government travel must be on American air carriers) accompanied by two State Department officials, Stuart (played by John Carroll Lynch) and Mark (played by Jon Tenney); the former a bumbling bureaucratic type, the latter acting as if he is a member of the CIA. After they arrive, Brooks conducts interviews to select an assistant. He chooses Maya (played by Sheetal Sheth), who has a jealous Iranian boyfriend (played by Anjul Nigam). Accosting people in the streets of New Delhi to find out what will make people laugh is not productive, so he decides to present the first one-person stand-up comedian show in town. However, he bombs, without a single laugh in the audience. Next, his CIA associate finds some budding comedians in Pakistan who will give him a four-hour interview. However, since the bumbling bureaucrat cannot get him a visa promptly, he has to go across the border illegally. When he arrives, the so-called comedians want him to perform, and a group of about eight Pakistanis laugh their heads off from the same routine (through a Pakistani interpreter) that he tried in New Delhi. Authorities in Pakistan are now suspicious of his real purpose, as are Indian officials, and troops began to mass at both borders. The "CIA" associate then tells him that the American embassy urges him to leave ASAP, so he returns home to Los Angeles, after which there is a resumption of the Indo-Pakistani border war. Titles at the end indicate that he received no medal; after all, he did not hand in the 500-page report. Comedic themes are found all along the story, but they are often empty. For example, we learn that government reports average longer than 500 pages so that they will not be read and to get to his office Brooks walks pass a telephone bank that handles airline reservations and ultimately even the White House switchboard. He also walks past the Taj Mahal without seeing the monument. At one point, Brooks turns down an offer from Al Jazeera for the title role in a sitcom called That Darn Jew. The ending, however, is an anticlimax, as if a rewrite from a riskier story. The presence of a "CIA agent" suggests a very different ending, which might have been too offensive politically. What could be more offensive than the premise that Indians have no sense of humor but Pakistanis do? The movie, (dropped by Sony and picked up by Warner Independent Pictures, was nevertheless received without protest at a film festival in Dubai. Anyway, we still await an answer to the question, What will make Muslims laugh? Definitely not Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World. MH
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