Make Jokes Not War

People search for many things in India, but comedian Albert Brooks is the first one to search for laughs – and the first one to put the M word – Muslim – into the title of a Hollywood film. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World lost its original distributor Sony Pictures when Brooks refused to change the title. This gentle comedy has no belly laughs, but mirrors the ignorance and befuddlement of the U.S. administration when faced with complexity in the third world. Brooks plays a comic who is commissioned by the U.S. Government to do a 500-page report on what makes Muslims laugh. The fact that they send him to India, a largely Hindu country, shows how confused they are!

Brooks wanders the streets of Delhi telling jokes, asking questions and even doing a stand up improv act in a school that turns out to be a complete dud. One great bonus of the film is the stunning shots of Delhi, capturing the energy of this vital city. So pre-occupied is Brooks with himself, that he fails to even notice the spectacular Taj Mahal when he goes there! Some funny moments with Call Centers and Al Jazeera keep you smiling. The film also stars the wide-eyed and natural Sheetal Sheth as Brooks’ secretary and she has the New Delhi accent down perfectly.

Instead of finding out what makes Muslims, or for that matter, Hindus, laugh, Brooks unwittingly escalates hostility between India and Pakistan with troop buildups on the border. The film is light-hearted yet makes some important points. It’s a parable for our times: in the epilogue the U.S. Administration nixes its Laugh Détente and in fact undertakes to make more powerful missiles, which can be fired right from the hangar.

So is humor more effective than traditional methods of international relations? Says Brooks, ” I don’t think it can be more effective, but why not add it? What I’m saying is that with all of the other things the United States has in its arsenal, which are weapons and spying and the CIA, it just wouldn’t be a bad thing to add human contact.”

He confesses that filming the movie in India was memorable for him personally. “I was in the biggest mosque in India and they never allow any filming in that mosque. I’m a Jewish man and I don’t think there’s been 15 Jewish people in that mosque ever,” he recalls. “But in order to get permission I had to talk to the Imam, the man who is head of the mosque. And I’m just having a private discussion with him and telling him I’m doing a movie about a character who has come to this part of the world to find out what makes people laugh. And he started to laugh. And then he said, ‘Okay,’ so I felt like a diplomat for two minutes.”