Albert Brooks has always been a comic with a sense of humor that makes no compromises. But in taking on the sensitive subject of the West's troubled relations with Islam, his desire to be constructive makes him pull some punches.
"A Jew walks into Al-Jazeera..."
From such prosaic beginnings can come reasonably memorable jokes. But as crafted by Albert Brooks, a man revered by comedy connoisseurs as one of the funniest and quirkiest performing talents in America, from such a joke can come a full-length feature movie, "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World."
In this quasi-mockumentary, Brooks both directs and plays a variant of himself, an unemployed actor and one-time stand-up comic named Albert Brooks, who is sent on a mission by the U.S. State Department to find out just what gives Muslims the chuckles. The idea is to find out what, if anything, they have in common with Americans beyond an interest in oil and warfare.
The fact that he ends up in India (which does have over 100 million Muslims, it should be said) appears to be part of the joke about America's endemic geographical cluelessness. But the joke was a convenient one, since Brooks was unwilling even to try shooting his film in a Muslim Middle Eastern country.
"The Arab/Muslim world is obviously a fabulous place," Brooks, a notorious homebody and onetime shut-in, tells The Jerusalem Report, with no apparent irony. "But the one thing I wouldn't want to do is go to the few safe countries and call it Iran - then I might as well go shoot in Van Nuys. Clearly, I'm not getting into Saudi Arabia, I'm not getting into Iran, I'm not getting into Syria. You can get a Fox News crew into Saudi Arabia, but you can't get in a hundred Americans led by a Jewish director. When the head of Iran says on Wednesday, 'Let's wipe Israel off the map,' he's not saying 'but Thursday, let that Jew director in here; we'll give him access to all the mosques.'"
The film begins with the hero suffering the usual procession of indignities aficionados will recognize as standard fare for Brooks's cinematic alter egos. After Brooks, who has been tempted into accepting the mission with the prospect of a Presidential Medal of Freedom, receives his marching orders in Washington, he has to fly coach for 19 hours to New Delhi; there, no one comes to the airport to pick him up; his handlers set him up with a rundown office in the boondocks, and begin criticizing his comedy routines; and a woman in an austere black abaya won't work for him as an assistant if he is a Jew. He tells her he's only a Jew part-time, which throws her for a loop.
Our hapless anti-hero has reluctantly committed to producing a 500-page report on his findings, although he has been assured no one will ever read it, so he begins canvassing the local population. This approach doesn't pan out as hoped, as most of the folks he encounters find Brooks, his questions and his affiliation with the U.S. government off-putting.
But if Mohammedans won't come to the mountain, perhaps Krishna will: Hoping to learn what makes them laugh by inspiring laughter himself, Brooks invites the Indian public to a free evening of American stand-up at a local school, featuring himself. It's not one of his better ideas. Facing an audience that lacks the necessary cultural referents, and that doesn't quite get the point of tired Vegas shtick, lousy puns or tongue-in-cheek depictions of an inept ventriloquist and a fascistic improv artist, Brooks watches as gags that once made "Tonight Show" host Johnny Carson apoplectic with delight dive-bomb in Delhi.
If this is not disheartening enough, Al-Jazeera, which in the film's telling is contemplating the launch of an entertainment-broadcasting offshoot, to be called Al-Jazeera-E, offers Brooks the starring role in a sitcom about an American Hebrew who moves into an Arab neighborhood. The show, he learns, will be called "Hadi Yehudi Mal'un" - "That Cursed Jew," which his hosts translate as "That Darn Jew." Despite his e-Bay-addicted wife's urgings that he consider it - work is work, she points out, and a six-episode commitment without being required to produce a pilot episode is unheard of in Hollywood - Brooks's character quite properly demurs.
But things pick up when he discovers that a group of armed Pakistani wannabe comedians have heard he is in the neighborhood and are eager to have him visit and talk shop. The Pakistani government refuses Brooks an entry visa. But not to worry! His State Department handlers contract somebody they hear just might be sufficiently reliable to smuggle him alone across the border for a brief tete-a-tete in the hashish smoke-shrouded no-man's-land between India and Pakistan. And hopefully bring him back in one piece.
Hilarious in spots, and good-natured throughout, "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" is nonetheless not one of Albert Brooks's better efforts. It is certainly not in the same league as "Modern Romance," the 1980 movie that Stanley Kubrick cited as one of his all-time favorites, the caustically hilarious "Lost in America" (1985) or even the touching and insightful film "Mother" (1990), in which Brooks, playing opposite Debbie Reynolds, returns home after a divorce to gain insight into his failed relationships with women.
Brooks's comedy is normally favored by a small but discerning minority of cognoscenti, among whom he has been called the "Woody Allen of the West." In "Looking for Comedy," though, Brooks purges himself of the bridled yet consuming rage that gives his typically terribly put-upon characters their passive-aggressive punch. Here he's too busy making nice with Muslims to be enraged. The result is a film bereft of fangs, its blunted claws left to scrape up against little more than the foibles of American insularity and self-absorption. At no point do they tear into the absurdities or contradictions of the world the film purports to want to explore and illuminate.
Ironically, Brooks, who spoke with The Report during an interview at a Beverly Hills hotel, says that making a comedy to help clarify, or at least take some of the sting out of, the mutual cultural befuddlement confounding West and Middle East in recent years did not prove nearly as daunting as the mere fact of calling the film "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World." Sony Pictures backed out of its distribution commitment when, in the aftermath of the flap over Newsweek's mistaken May 2005 Koran desecration story, and shortly before the film was to screen at the Toronto Film Festival last October, Brooks refused to budge on the title.
He lost little time finding a new distributor, Warner Independent Pictures, whose parent company had marketed his earlier films, "Defending Your Life" (1991) and "Lost in America." And the film had its world premiere not in Toronto but at the Dubai International Film Festival, last December 15. Brooks says he was initially terrified at showing the movie for the first time in an Arab country. The event, however, proved to be, he told The Report, "the most memorable night in my life."
"It's a beautiful theater, gorgeous, with maybe 500, 600 people there. And about an hour before the screening starts, the head of the festival is beside himself. 'The Minister of Information just flew in from Abu Dhabi!' And my first reaction is 'Well, if he walks out, does everyone else have to? What's the tradition here?' I'm only thinking of the disaster.
"So they close the balcony for the sheikh, and the lights go down, and they grab me and say the sheikh wants to meet me, so I grab my wife, we go off to the balcony, but the movie has already started. He's not even looking at us, but they say, 'Just sit down, he'll talk to you when he chooses.'
"So I watch this entire movie behind these 14 men, his entourage, and I'm thinking the whole time, 'That Darn Jew,' is that going to work? And then we get to it, and the sheikh and his buddies are just jabbing each other, laughter is just pouring out of the balcony, and down below they are all going crazy! Then the sheikh turns around and does a double take - he didn't even know I was there. And he made this gesture with both his hands" - and here Brooks holds his hands with palms open, parallel but apart - "and said, 'A movie like this can bridge the culture between here… and there.'"
For Brooks, who has never managed to bridge the gaping maw between his own highly idiosyncratic comedic sensibility and mainstream America's love affair with sophomoric physical humor, it was an unexpected triumph. It is also one his film will likely be hard put to repeat as it makes the theatrical rounds in America.
Albert Brooks was born in 1947 to a Los Angeles-based family of entertainers - his father was radio comedian Harry Einstein, known as his Greek-accented alter ego Parkyarkarkas (pronounced "park your carcass"); his mother, Thelma Leeds, nee Bernstein, was a dancer. If they thought that naming their son Albert would keep him out of show business, theirs was a futile gesture. Attending Beverly Hills High School with progeny of the men who comprised the membership of the comedians' fraternity, the Friars Club, Albert slipped comfortably into the role of class clown. When he was 15, he created a short-lived comedy duo with Joey Bishop's son, Larry. He spent most of his days, however, hanging out at the residence of Carl Reiner, cracking up both father and son Rob with his lunacy. Once, when the boys got lost driving, Albert got out of the car and asked directions from a cow. Asked why, he said, "I don't know - it lived around here." The elder Reiner is said to have served as a surrogate father for Brooks after Albert's father died, in 1956, in the midst of a stand-up routine at the Friars Club. Carl Reiner would tell "Tonight Show" host Johnny Carson that the two funniest people he knew were Mel Brooks and "this high school kid named Albert Einstein."
Following a brief stint during high school as a sports writer for a local radio station, and after attending college for two years, he changed his name to Brooks and began writing comedy for a TV show called "Turn On," which was canceled after a single episode. Only slightly devastated, Brooks began appearing on such programs as "The Ed Sullivan Show," "The Steve Allen Show" and "Saturday Night Live." Eschewing jokes and one-liners, he distinguished himself with routines Gavin Smith, in a 1999 issue of Film Comment, described as a "unique, at the time innovative brand of self-reflexive meta-comedy." Time Magazine lauded Brooks's "madhouse theater" of the time, calling him "the smartest, most audacious comic since Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen." His dadaistic routines of a hopelessly incompetent comic made him one of Johnny Carson's most frequently asked-back performers, winning him exalted and much-coveted guest-host status.
Brooks was unusually self-confident and spontaneous in his performances, but by the mid-1970s, he was ready to quit the stand-up world, and even declined a career-crowning offer to host SNL. When pressed, however, to participate in some capacity, he asked to make a series of short satiric films, which ran on the show between 1975 and 1976 and which established the template for Brooks's on-screen persona. That template would gain its widest exposure in his role as a hapless, sweaty journalist in "Broadcast News" (1987), opposite Holly Hunter, a role that won Brooks an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor.
Brooks's characters, Gavin Smith suggested, tend to "refract the contradictions, compromises, and neuroses of the Baby Boom generation with its overdeveloped sense of entitlement and unapologetic materialism: narcissistic and controlling yet insecure and resigned, reflexively self-analytical yet lacking emotional self-honesty." Smith concluded that, "It's hard to think of another American filmmaker, who has dedicated him/herself so completely to scrutinizing the foibles of his generational peers without becoming moralistic or sentimental."
Brooks, it need also be said, does the best slow burn in the business. In almost all of his movies, he delivers the proverbial money shot by playing an average, somewhat creative guy who you just know will eventually blow into at least a low Earth orbit. The exception may be this latest effort, which plateaus because of Brooks's fear of somehow prolonging, or even worsening, the current kulturkampf between the Middle East and the West.
"I didn't pull any punches," he responded somewhat irately to this reporter's question, "because I was not trying to punch anybody. I'm just dismayed, that since 9/11, so little has been done in the arts about this," he told The Report, referring to both the subject of terror and the tension between the West and Islam, "especially in motion pictures. I don't know if it's a conscious decision by filmmakers. The first year, we were scared every day, the next attack is coming tomorrow, don't open your mail because of anthrax. The second year they were saying, be careful of holidays. We know it's coming, we don't know when. Now they're saying, this is the new world, and it's never going to end, and that's just how it is, so don't expect a peace treaty. There just won't be a moment where you'll ever know it's over.
"If this is the world, from now on, then you've got to make comedies."