According to Louis Wittig, Albert Brooks' new Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is much more of a bust than its title suggests:

With his characteristic inclination for meta-comedy, Brooks plays himself: a neurotic comedian drifting through Hollywood. Because its first few choices passed, the State department drafts Brooks to fly to India with a pair of handlers (John Carroll Lynch and Jon Tenny) to compile a 500-page report on what makes the Muslim world laugh.

Isn’t India mostly a Hindu joint? Brooks the character gets a non-answer from State and, promised a medal for his service, bolts for the subcontinent. Brooks the writer/director owes his audience an explanation for this geocultural disconnect. What he eventually provides goes a long way to explaining why his movie doesn’t go anywhere.

Brooks’s slow, artificially uncomplicated scenes punctuated with Seinfeldian dialogue don’t work as well here as they have in his previous films. With the title (which caused Sony Pictures, its original distributor, to drop it as it was too incendiary) and the subject matter, Brooks sets his viewers up to expect something more than the single-minded self-deprecation he delivers.

Once he’s settled in New Delhi, Brooks picks up a pointless Indian assistant, Maya (Sheetal Sheth). She takes notes as he randomly stops Indians on the street and assaults them with jokes. He subjects an auditorium full of stone-faced Indians to his old stand-up routine. (This is the one moment when Brooks’s meta-comedy comes close to delivering. In interviews he’s said that part of his motivation for making the movie was unifying different cultures through laughter. Ugh. But having American audiences watching, though not laughing, at an Indian audience that’s watching, though not laughing, at Albert Brooks, is a clever put-on.) He meets with Al Jazeera executives and is offered a part in their new sitcom, That Darn Jew.

For as far and as wide and as aimlessly as he wanders, though, nowhere does Brooks the character or Brooks the director remember that the whole production was supposed to have something to do with Muslims. At no point does he seek out an imam, or a halal butcher, to entertain. The Indian and Pakistani governments can’t figure out what he’s up to either, and after their spies overhear him innocently tell an Iranian that it’s okay to bomb, he’s whisked out of the country to strains of “America the Beautiful.”

Looking’s last five minutes, where Brooks’s wife toasts her returning spouse as “the Kissinger of Comedy” lays out the earnest cluelessness of Americans that, the audience realizes, Brooks has been trying to make the center of the movie all along. Again, clever, but not funny — just vaguely confusing.

I had to chuckle though, when I saw last night that the film was billed at the Camera 7 multiplex in Campbell as simply "Looking For Comedy", implying the theater was--for a mystifying reason that I certainly can't figure out--afraid to run the whole title, even though there was plenty of room for it on the theater's large signage.

Somewhere, I know Theo Van Gogh is enjoying the irony.