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Dubai worth the journey for Brooks’ Muslim comedy

DUBAI - Premiering your film at an obscure festival some 8,000 miles away from home might seem an odd choice for a veteran Hollywood player.

But for Albert Brooks’ first film in six years, “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” the second annual Dubai International Film Festival, which ended on Saturday, was a perfect fit.

“In this case it was a very specific festival for a specific movie,” said Herb Nanas, Brooks’ producer. “You couldn’t have asked for a better match.”

“Looking for Comedy” features Brooks as an out-of-work comedian, handpicked by the US State Department to discover what tickles the funny bones of Muslims in India and Pakistan. Once in Delhi, Brooks fails utterly in his assignment, produces just six pages of a required 500-page report and manages to leave the two countries in a state of heightened tension.

“The whole world is tense. Everybody gets the international news,” Brooks said. “There’s been no American comedy at all that even remotely addresses the subject in any way. My goal isn’t to solve the world’s problems. My character wasn’t even able to do his assignment. But the premise of wanting to find out about somebody — other than the stuff that the CIA will tell you — there’s no hope unless we do that.”

“We’re showing the buffoonery of Americans and this innocent comic who thinks he’s gonna win a peace prize and ends up almost touching off a nuclear war. That’s what the story is about,” Nanas said.

Audience members in Dubai, an Arab city-state where the majority of the population are expats from the Indian subcontinent, laughed loudly and often. Brooks, who sat beside one of the country’s ruling family members, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, said the shaikh “laughed his head off and at the end he said to me, ’This could really help both sides.’ That’s it, that’s what it’s all about.”

“Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World” opens Jan. 21 in the United States via Warner Bros.