Albert Brooks plays Albert Brooks, on a government
mission to study Indo-Pakistani humor. The amusing premise is stretched a bit
too far to sustain a feature.
The
premise is the most amusing thing about Albert Brooks’s latest, his first as a
writer-director since 1999’s The Muse. Brooks stars as…Albert Brooks, an
out-of-work comedian actor hired by the U.S. government to find out what people
in India and Pakistan think is funny. Perhaps enemy hostiles can be won over
with some disarming humor. Brooks has gotten the job, he’s told, because the
government’s first few choices were working. Brooks knows comedy, but nothing
about research. His methodology consists of asking people, “What makes you
laugh?” and putting on a show and seeing what goes over. Brooks’s dour persona
is something that probably either works for you or doesn’t, but this isn’t
among his better films (which would include Lost in America and Defending
Your Life). His ongoing concern about being able to fill a 500-page report
was funny to me; so was Brooks’s reprisal of one of his old routines, the
world’s worst ventriloquist. On the whole, though, I felt that a thin idea was
being stretched too far, the way I did about two other show-biz comedies, Hollywood
Ending and Bowfinger.
posted 9/17/13
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