Looking For Comedy in The Muslim World

Albert Brooks' films have a certainly sense of humor to them. If you're a fan of his humor, you love his movies. If you're not, then there's always a National Lampoon's movie somewhere on the New Releases shelf at your nearest Blockbuster to tide you over.

Looking For Comedy In The Muslim World stars Brooks as a man who gets sent to Pakistan to find out what the Muslims consider humorous. This information, it is thought, will be somehow helpful to the current U.S. president and his poor foreign relations with the Muslim countries.

As an actor, Brooks plays his usual fish-out-of-water role. But as a storyteller, he manages something that American cinema can rarely accomplish: he portrays the Muslims as intelligent, competant, cooperative, humane people. Muslims are so often villified by our movies that we have a hard time remembering that they are just as human as us. If Brooks can keep this up for the whole film, it should shape up to be a very funny, very progressive American comedy.