Still Looking

By now the brouhaha over Vice President Cheney's rifle malfunction has subsided, owing somewhat to the accelerated strife in Iraq and the poor vetting by the Administration of the Dubai company hired to oversee our ports. Neither of the aforementioned events is comic in any way, unless one gets titters from the declining poll numbers of the Chief Executive and Dubya. (Cheney has an approval rate of 18%, which is astounding; I'd guess it compares favorably only to that of Mohammad Atta and Tim McVeigh.)

The cleanest, cleverest joke about Cheney is that his biography is titled "Eats, Shoots and Leaves"; I also enjoyed the superimposition of he and lawyer friend Whittington onto the iconic two-shot poster from "Brokeback Mountain." Cheney, likely not to have seen the movie (unless daughter Mary forced him to), would not respond well to that cartoon. Well, at least he was not pictured with a turban and a bomb inside. Can you imagine how the Muslims would react to a cartoon of, say, Muhammad and Bin Laden in that "Brokeback" longing shot? The entire culture might spontaneously combust. And speaking of Bin Laden, another yuk-yuk is Dubya's insistence that he will be caught.

As you can tell, I am a partisan of dry, deadpan humor, which brings me to writer-director Albert Brooks. Recently I was one of the few persons to attend a Writers Guild screening of his recent movie, "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," which did not receive good reviews or any public acceptance. I think in time it will be far more appreciated, if only for its humanity and spooky prescience. Although it was not as inspired as his two best films, "Defending Your Life" and "Mother," it did contain some worthy comic moments, usually geared toward showbiz. I was rather tickled when a group of executives from Al Jazeera offered Brooks a six-show pay-or-play deal to star in their new sitcom, "That Darn Jew." And he certainly took advantage of the Indian setting to scourge the ubiquitous practice of corporate outsourcing to India of customer-service complaints from American institutions from McDonalds to the White House. Other bits, such as the DOD demand that his report on "Comedy in the Muslim World" be 500 pages despite his ability to fill only two pages, ran dry very early, as did his plot contrivances.

But something in Brooks' world view as expressed here and in earlier efforts rings so true. He is very attentive to the polite veneers that representatives of our institutions wear to hide either their hostility or their cluelessness. Fred Dalton Thomson, playing an askew version of himself (like Brooks), sends the befuddled comedian on a journey to India and Pakistan because our nation needs to better understand the Muslim mind set. (I gather it might have been more efficient to send him to the Middle East, but filming there would have been more dangerous than Brooks or his insurance company could have accepted). That the government thinks that studying a culture through its sense of humor is worth a commission seems certainly ludicrous on many levels, including the fact that a sense of humor is idiosyncratic to every person. And the hopelessness of such a study is what gives Brooks' quest such a sense of comic futility.

Still, Brooks is saying something wonderfully profound underneath it all. As disparate as our hopes, dreams and faiths are, everyone has a sense of humor (with the possible exception of Tom Cruise); it is one of the few traits that human beings share that actually enhances our lives, and one of the few characteristics that make us superior to lower mammals. We are all confronted with Cosmic irony and indifference and it might help us all to find a common reason to laugh at our communal fate.

There was one moment in the movie when everyone gasped uncomfortably, and that's when Brooks comments offhandedly about different nationalities having different senses of humor; some of which are opaque--like the Danish. "What do the Danish do for jokes?" he wonders on-screen. There's no way that Brooks wrote that innocuous comment with any notion that a Danish editorial cartoon would be the talk of the world and that a clumsy attempt at Occidental humor might instigate riots and deaths among frenzied Muslims. For pure bizarre timeliness this reminds me of the explosion at Three Mile Island a week after "The China Syndrome" opened in 1979. And in fact, Brooks plotting eventually has India and Pakistan going to battle over a misunderstanding of what he is doing in their midst.

Next up for Brooks? If there's no fatwa against him, maybe a quail-hunting mockumentary; hopefully not a treatment on Armageddon. Remember, he not only predicted literal laugh riots in the Middle East, but the onset of the TV reality phenomenon with his first movie, "Real Life." Nostradamus, you have competition.