When good comedians go bad

Feb. 10, 2006 | In Shawn Levy's gaspingly unfunny "The Pink Panther" -- not a remake of the Blake Edwards original, but a version of some vague idea of the original -- Steve Martin may play Inspector Clouseau. But at least he's smart enough to know that he can't play Peter Sellers. In the movie's production notes, Martin says, "I bent it a little bit because I am a different person. When I looked at those movies, I understood that Peter Sellers could ad-lib all day within the context of the character." Martin knew he had to reinvent the role, which he did mostly by devising an identifiably Martinesque faux-French accent that sounds like a speech impediment.

Martin's Clouseau is a performance draped precariously on a thumbtack of a gimmick. "The Pink Panther" is lousy for many reasons: For one thing, its rhythms wobble and weave drunkenly, and even the potentially funny jokes hang in the stratosphere, twinkling dimly with far too much space around them, before crashing to earth. But because "The Pink Panther" is a star vehicle, Martin has to bear most of the blame. Like another recent disappointment from a comedian many of us long ago came to love, Albert Brooks' "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," "The Pink Panther" cements the idea that, no matter how much faith we place in our favorite comedians, their presence alone is never enough to guarantee laughs. Brooks' and Martin's recent failures carry a particularly potent sting: How can comedians we've come to trust so much let us down so hard?

It's tempting to go easier on comedians than we do on other performers, because the mechanism of what makes a person funny is so frighteningly precarious. For better or worse, building a comedy career is like building a brand. We know Steve Martin has made us laugh in the past: "L.A. Story" and "The Jerk" do seem like ancient history in light of recent check-cashing exercises like the "Cheaper by the Dozen" franchise, or vehicles designed to lend Martin the aura of classiness he seems to crave so desperately, like the recent (and rather creepy) film version of his novel, "Shopgirl."

But even though Martin has tried a range of roles over the course of his career (and has been terrific in some of the more serious ones, like Herbert Ross' desperately beautiful 1981 "Pennies from Heaven"), we still -- naively, maybe -- want to believe that his presence in a comedy is a stamp of quality, or at least just a promise of it. It's hard to know how comedies like "The Pink Panther" are conceived, but my guess is that some guys were sitting around in a room one day and said, "Hey -- let's have Steve Martin play Inspector Clouseau!" And there, any serious dialogue ended, even before it began. A rudimentary plotline (if you can even call the mechanics of "The Pink Panther" a plot) was sketched out: Kevin Kline plays an officious, ambitious French bureaucrat; Beyoncé Knowles is the pop-star girlfriend of a murdered soccer coach, played (too briefly) by Jason Statham. All Martin has to do is show up and be funny.

Obviously, that's an oversimplification of how a movie comes together. But looking at the result, how are we supposed to know differently? Brooks' "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" suffers from similar problems, although Brooks' case is far more frustrating. Like many moviegoers, when I first heard about the premise of Brooks' movie -- a comedian is sent to the Middle East by the State Department to find out what makes those mysterious Muslims giggle -- I couldn't wait to see what he'd come up with. Brooks' face alone, so deadpan and so anxious, has always seemed emblematic to me of the way we all, deep down, feel so uncertain about our place in the world. And yet Brooks has always been more than just a quivering pile of neuroses; he has some bite, too.

But as vehicles go, "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" turned out to be a clunker, and in comedy terms at least, one with a blasphemously misleading title. The picture feels overworked and yet weirdly unformed, as if Brooks had tried too hard and yet stopped far short of where he needed to go. (The woman who plays his Indian assistant, Sheetal Sheth, is much funnier than he is -- her timing leaves his in the dust.) The movie casts wide, safe, cushy loops around any potentially touchy subject, like, say, religion. The whole enterprise feels particularly lame in light of the recent furor over those Danish cartoon caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Forget mild jokes about Gandhi; now we really know what Muslims don't find funny. What's the point of tackling a subject like this one if you're not going to risk getting the studio burned down?

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