Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2006)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Don't listen to the negative reviews

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

"Relax."I did just that and enjoyed this story! The film has its ups and downs, but it seemed the whole concept was a joke, well I hope so at least, but it was easy enough to take as such. If the premise is taken too seriously, or the 'facts' and likenesses are taken too literally, then yeah, there are some issues... but this is a light-hearted comedy!"Gray skies are gonna Clear up, Put on a happy face"I don't know Albert Brooks comedy routines all that well, and did not sit down with any expectation that he would be funny, or not, or that the film was true or not, but simply wondered what these folks were going to do to entertain me for an hour or so. I was entertained, thanks!"Brush off the clouds and cheer up, Put on a happy face"

This movie is offensive to everything that is comedy. The title itself is misleading and it continuously tries to compensate for an obvious lack of actual story. There are a lot of things that I can say about this movie, but I don't want to waste your time like this movie wasted mine. Some of these reviews give 5 stars up, I even read a 8 review. These are obviously greased reviews and I would take them with a grain of salt. I also think that it may have been a little racist at some points (I didn't want to say it, but some of the stuff is just on that line). There is one thing about this movie that made me laugh, if you look at Albert Brook on the poster they have for IMDb they obviously photo shopped it so that he would lose 20lb!(hahaha)Besides that its not funny or remotely entertaining. DO NOT WATCH!

Other reviewers have got it wrong. This isn't dry intellectual humor that'll have you laughing hours later after you think about the line. This is vapid and uninspired humor that was horribly executed and horribly shot.The camera angles are uninspired, the music is canned, the acting and overall film are simply poorly directed. Lots of master shots, few if any cutaways. There is absolutely nothing here to accentuate the humor in the film. It's bland as can be.The one scene that had some humor in it was left on the cutting room floor, and the other comedic sequence cast some aspirations on international rivals.The real crux of the matter is that the film presupposes that somehow humor is not universal. It also demonstrates a kind of intellectual high-brow naiveté about the middle east. Ironically enough the film was allegedly aimed at a western audience and trying to bridge social divides, but falls miserably flat on its face through lack of zest.The other aspect is that this is, more likely, a test market film that needed to recoup its losses. It was shot with a minimal budget, and had production values to match. What was being tested here (the director? the viability of shooting a low budget film in India?) I have no idea, but it's market appeal has all the earmarks of a film that is ready to have its return and market analysis fast tracked to the studio heads and marketing department.Why on earth there would be more than 100 reviews for this film is beyond me. What's even more puzzling is why there would be praises heaped onto this thing when it was intentionally half baked.Did I mention the ending? Well, I can't, but it's not funny, just like the rest of the film.

Albert Brooks' comedy has always been too dry for my taste, but his latest directorial venture is absolutely pathetic. This movie is supposed to be a comedy, but it barely makes you laugh. Maya and the embassy officials are painfully unfunny, even to the extent of taking away some of the fun.It is almost a cliché that Brooks, as an American, has to explain nuances of the English language to the Indian Maya. Perhaps Brooks needs to be reminded that "Indian" English is more authentically English than the Americanized version. The concept of interviewing the Indian candidates near the beginning of the movie must have seemed funny on paper, but the end result was cringingly boring. How can you mess up such a perfect opportunity for laugh-out-loud comedy? His stand-up routines in the movie are not for the common man in the US, let alone Indians in New Delhi. The whole concept of "what makes you laugh" does not yield any comedy whatsoever. The sojourn to Pakistan wasn't even interesting. The Pakistani laughing jacks seemed more like drunk jokers than "aspiring comedians." The whole movie was so focused on Brooks that it seemed more like an attempt at self-promotion rather than entertainment.This movie is for you only if you want to bore yourself for 98 min, or if you're a Brooks fan-boy.