Abroad Comedy

Albert Brooks Went Off the Beaten Laugh Track to Learn What Makes Muslims Chuckle

The audience applauded, the lights came up, and John Podesta, distinguished head of a liberal Washington think tank, stood before the crowd to praise the film they had all just seen -- "a wonderful movie," he said, that will "teach us something about ourselves."

The director, also present, responded with a plea for "human-to-human contact" between Americans and people elsewhere in the world. "Most people in societies really like each other," he observed.

Sen. John Kerry, too, attended the advance screening, which was hosted Sunday afternoon by Podesta's Center for American Progress, and added his own thumbs-up. "I think it's a very creative and challenging concept," the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee told a reporter as the crowd ambled out of the Regal Gallery Place theater. "It really opens a lot of different conversations."

One moment, please. All of this earnest uplift and official Washington approbation for . . . an Albert Brooks movie?

Albert Brooks, the Brillo-haired satirist of self-absorbed baby boomer angst? The court jester of Hollywood, whose movie scripts and comedy albums have, for more than three decades, exposed and ridiculed the customs and hypocrisies of the entertainment business? The sweaty schnook substitute anchorman of "Broadcast News"? That guy has wandered into the saintly realm of goo-goo public service?

Yes and no. It's the same man, all right, and for the first time he's confronting subjects that dominate the news. But he's doing it in a peculiarly Albert Brooks way. His film, opening Jan. 20, is called "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World."

"The truth is, I wanted to grab my own career by the [private parts] again," Brooks says, "and I wanted to do something that I was scared to do."

Over lunch Friday, he was discussing the genesis of the new film, the seventh he has directed and written (or co-written). He has starred in all of them, always playing some version of himself -- a petty, worried, flummoxed version. He is not reluctant to portray himself thus: "I know what my comic character is," he says.

In "Looking for Comedy," there is less distance than ever between the man and his role. He plays, as indeed he is, a Los Angeles comedian named Albert Brooks, and there are facetious references to his roles in "The In-Laws" and "Finding Nemo," both of which are on the real Brooks's résumé. A character in the film mentions a previous Brooks movie, "Lost in America," and offhandedly critiques it: "I thought the ending was tacked on, a little bit."

This almost-Brooks is summoned to Washington by a fictitious federal commission led by former senator Fred Dalton Thompson (playing himself). The panel wants the comedian to undertake a month-long mission to India and Pakistan, where, in an effort to help America better understand Muslims, he will try to find out what makes them laugh. Then he will turn in a report -- 500 pages, please, because anything less would be a waste of the commission's money.

Why me, among all of America's comedians, Brooks wants to know. "Quite frankly," Thompson replies, "our first few choices were working."

Brooks is unsure until Thompson suggests an ignoble, selfish motive, typically Brooksian: "I would think that the Medal of Freedom would do wonders for your acting price."