What Makes You Laugh?

That's the question asked by Albert Brooks in his recent film "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World". I think he intended that to be a comedy but exactly like the audience in the movie to whom he told jokes during his stand-up act in India, there were hardly any critics laughing.

I did laughed a bit when I saw the movie, but well, rarely. In the movie, Brooks' attempt to look for comedy in India and Pakistan ended up in an escalation of an already tense bilateral relationship between the two countries. Fortunately enough, it did not ended in a billowing mushroom cloud of nuclear boom.

Frankly, I wasn't interested in the movie because Albert Brooks starred in it, but merely because of the title. Say, I think Mr. Brooks took the wrong turn in picking the countries to feature in this movie. Sure that there are Muslims in India, but in terms of numbers, the Hindis trumped the Muslims (don't get mad, I didn't write that Hindu is better than Islam or the Hindis are better than Muslims in terms of quality).

I even think that Mr Brooks could use Indonesia as the featured country. Muslims dominate the population here, though. Or maybe he could try Saudi Arabia, or maybe Iran.

Anyway, the movie implicitly suggested how the intelligence of both India and Pakistan got themselves easily suspicious of each other that troops buildup could easily triggered along the borderline of both countries. From India to Pakistan (illegally), and then to Al-Jazeera's office, this smelled like the trail of Osama (excluding Afghanistan, though).

Now let's get back to the title of this post. Speaking of laughing, I doubt that Mr Brooks' movie could make me laugh enough. What can make me laugh? Well, a Seinfeld episode could make me laugh, as well as a Looney Tunes episode. I laugh at Little Britain, at Douglas Adams' books, at Love, Actually. Yeah, I am quite interested in British comedies. They have different flavors than their American counterparts. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, but not Swept Away, could make me laugh. British jokes are sometimes self-degrading, yet smart. I could hardly find such quality comedies in American movies nowadays (or maybe I wasn't trying hard enough?).

So, in the end, the world is indeed needs to learn to laugh at itself and stop behaving too seriously, especially during this provocative era.

Well, got to go now. Will write again later.