| By Fred Topel
In Theaters January 20
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When Albert Brooks went Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, he wasn’t asking for controversy. He just thought it was a funny way of dealing with our modern crisis.
“There have certainly not been any comedies about anything post 9/11, and very few dramas,” Brooks said. “Just the few that are coming up now which I call ‘the terrorists with a heart of gold’ dramas, those movies like suicide bombers changing their minds. But the idea of making something that you’re reasonably making people try to laugh at, but I knew it was going to be unusual, and it was the whole reason I wanted to make it. I’m just dismayed that since 9/11, so little has been done in the arts about this, especially in motion pictures.”
As Brooks cites, most of the 2005 front runners for award season are period pieces like Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Good Night and Good Luck and Memoirs of a Geisha. “I don’t know if it’s a conscious decision by filmmakers to say ‘I’m not going to deal with it,’ or if people sort of don’t know how their going to deal with it. As I said, there’s a few dramas that are coming up that are trying to tackle this thing. But there’s no comedy and that’s sort of what I just thought. I sat home the first year, and we were scared every day, the next attack is coming tomorrow, don’t open your mail, there was the anthrax, everything is bad. Then, the second year, it lessened a little bit, but they were still saying be careful of holidays, 4th of July. Then the third year, now it’s developed into ‘Look, we know it’s coming, we don’t know when, this is the new world, and it’s never going to end, and that’s basically what the message is, don’t expect a peace treaty on this war, there won’t be a moment where you’ll ever know it’s over, that’s what they’re telling us. So if this is the world, from now on, then you’ve got to make comedies.”
The premise of Looking For Comedy has Brooks hired by the U.S. government to visit India and Pakistan to research a report on what makes Muslims laugh. He can only dream that the suits might actually fund such research.
“Take your trillion dollars and buy the weapons. I understand that’s what they’re going to do, but take a billion dollars and put 50,000 people on the ground. I call it the ‘schmooze corps.’ Let people just make contact around the world, because all people know about America is what they read in the paper, and it’s not been really great for the last number of years. But what I found in India, when I would go to dinner with somebody, and you would have contact with them, if they had a good time with you, they would be thinking ‘eh, that guy is pretty cool. It’s a cool place.’ Now, obviously, they’re never going to have a ‘What makes people laugh’ program, but that’s the idea of the comedy. But they could have ‘take someone to dinner, find out what people like to wear, find out what kind of music they like.’”
At first glance, India might not seem like the place to explore the Muslim world, but even its minority Muslim population is among the highest concentration in the world. “One thing about this story that was very important to me was the India/Pakistani conflict. I also was always interested in showing India as it is now. You usually see A Passage to India or The Jungle Book. I don’t think many Americans know what the streets look like today. So I was always interested in South Asia and if you include Indonesia and India and Pakistan, that alone is 500 million Muslims. That’s a large part of the Muslim world.”
The film premiered at the Dubai Film Festival, attending which Brooks considers the best moment of his life. “There was an audience of 500 people, and half of them were in traditional Arab dress, the men were in robes, the women were in Beas. And what do I know? I have no idea of how this is going to do. Nobody can say, ‘Well, last year, the comedy Jack Goes to the Muslim World did very well.’ I know all the lines I have, ‘Those Darn Jews,’ is that going to work? They’re just jabbing each other, the whole audience is going, the laughter is pouring into the balcony, it was a great night. I’ve had other of my films, I saw Mother in Copenhagen, and it was translated. It was all right. People didn’t laugh as much as they did in Los Angeles. I’m telling you, this was like the hottest screening. It wasn’t translated, but the cool thing was they got some of the jokes before the translations came up because it’s a very interesting mix of audience. They’re Arab Muslims, Muslims from South Asia, and there were Hindu’s and Europeans. And when the guy is doing his Arabic, he’s going from right to left, and then he translates That Darn Jew; when he said it in Arabic, half the audience just went crazy, so they didn’t have to go back the other way in the English.”
Indeed, the only controversy generated was when the film’s original distributor, Sony Pictures, decided it did not want to release a movie with the word “Muslim” in the title. “Certain controversies are sort of created by a person trying to prevent the controversy. Why did such a reaction happen from Janet Jackson’s moment on the Super Bowl? I mean, that to me, if nobody said anything, I wondered if three days later, anyone would be talking about it. I felt the same way about the reaction to this title, if Sony didn’t make this whole to do.”
Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World opens January 20. |
