Writer-director-star Albert Brooks trumps himself while playing a smug American comedian named Albert Brooks, who is tapped by the U.S. government to go on a fact-finding mission to India and Pakistan. Once you get the movie’s central, oft-repeated joke – that isolated America is desperately out of touch with the cultures it is warring against – your attention begins to wander. Before long, you become seriously curious about just what gets them rolling in the aisles in New Delhi. It’s a question that Brooks, isolated in his own way in his single-minded pursuit of satire, never pauses to answer. Looking for Comedy in a Muslim World would have been far better if Brooks had bothered to look at all.
