Laugh till you cry

Who says Muslims can’t be funny? Two films I watched recently disprove the popular media image of dour, bearded men and veiled women who take themselves and their religion far too seriously. One light-hearted (“The Infidel”) and the other a dark comedy (“Four Lions”), both released in 2010, show that nobody makes a better comedic subject today than British Muslims, who are caught between insulation and integration and are smart enough to know how to mine that predicament for laughs.

“The Infidel” requires you to suspend belief just a little bit. Even if you discovered your birth parents were Jewish, it wouldn’t change how you had been raised and what you believed all your life – at least that’s the logical way of looking at things. But writer David Baddiel and director Josh Appignanesi use this as a jumping-off point, taking it in hilarious (and sometimes extreme) directions, to explore what religion, faith, and identity really look like in the end

     
           

The premise of “Four Lions” doesn’t sound terribly funny, but it’s the way filmmaker Chris Morris sets up the situations that induces the laughter – and not all of it is guilt-free. Omar is a security guard at a mall with a wife and son who not only know about his plans for martyrdom but support him as if he were the star player on a football team

Mahmud Nasir has been raised a Muslim, and he lives as one - more or less - in London’s East End, home to Muslims of all varieties and degrees. His beloved eldest son wants to get married to the stepdaughter of a radical Muslim cleric, who will only give his blessings to the marriage if Mahmud and his family are “Muslim enough”. Mahmood is willing to go along with the plan to act just a little more devout than he usually is - no sacrifice is too great for his family, right?

But then, after his mother’s death, Mahmud finds out that he was adopted and that his birth parents were Jews. This discovery plunges him into a sea of confusion. He tries to locate his true identity by trying to decide between the two faiths, and makes a total mess of his life in the process.

This is the premise of “The Infidel”, a funny, thought-provoking comedy that stars Omid Djalili as Mahmud Nasir, Archie Panjabi as his devoted wife, and Richard Schiff as Mahmud’s provocative Jewish neighbor. The film requires you to suspend belief just a little bit. Even if you discovered your birth parents were Jewish, it wouldn’t change how you had been raised and what you believed all your life - at least that’s the logical way of looking at things. But writer David Baddiel and director Josh Appignanesi use this as a jumping-off point, taking it in hilarious (and sometimes extreme) directions, to explore what religion, faith, and identity really look like in the end.

“I’m a fan of body swap movies - Trading Places, Big, Freaky Friday etc. - and I thought this was a modern and unusual take on them,” says writer Baddiel. “It’s not one I think could have been done fifteen years ago, as I think Muslim and Jew have only started to be thought as cultural opposites fairly recently. And of course part of what happens in this film is that they turn out to be somewhat less opposite than Mahmud first imagines. At the end, it’s a plea for tolerance, although I’m happy to have lots of comedy arguing on the way to tolerance.”

Djlalili is the lead of the movie but he’s also the star, as the easy-going, foul-mouthed, ordinary Muslim bloke who has to confront issues of identity and belonging when he discovers his “dirty” secret. Djalili, a British comedian of Iranian and Bahai origin, is famous for his stand-up comedy, but he’s made appearances in feature films playing serious roles: Picasso in “Modigliani” and various villains in “The Mummy” and “Gladiator”. Rotund and bald, with a comically rubbery face, a roaring voice, and large, expressive eyes, Djalili displays cockiness, uncertainty, sadness and ham-handed ridiculousness with equal confidence.

The part was written with Djalili in mind, says Baddiel. “He’s perfect for it in so many ways - and not just because he looks like he could be Jewish as well as Muslim. He’s such a naturally funny person, and he’s got a lot of innate lovability, which really helps when a character starts sailing into troubling waters, as Mahmud does. He’s also, I think, a really fine actor.”

At first Mahmud goes into denial, trying to be extra devout, but his curiosity gets the better of him, and he hides in his bedroom trying on a yarmulke and a fedora, just to see what he’d look like as a Jew. His shame and confusion over his newly-discovered origins drives him to his American Jewish neighbor, Lenny Goldberg, who tutors him in “Jewishness”, feeding him chicken soup and matzoh balls, taking him to a bar mitvah, and teaching him how to say the perfect “oy”.

When asked why Mahmud doesn’t simply ignore his new discovery, Baddiel responds, “For two reasons: one, he’s just not that sort of person. He’s a Homer Simpson type, he overreacts to things, gets into scrapes, etc. - so he was always going to do that with this information. And then, of course, there is a plot reason why he cannot ignore it, which is to do with his parentage, but I don’t want to give that away.”

Eventually Mahmud makes some grievous errors in his double act, and the secret’s let out in the most public, embarrassing way. But Mahmud redeems himself in the end by boning up on his religious knowledge with the help of both the Quran and the Torah, and manages to come to terms with his unusual identity, winning back the respect of his neighbors and his family.

The film, shot on a shoestring budget of just over £1 million, is side-splittingly funny, and though the premise can get silly from time to time, Djalili carries the role endearingly, making you appreciate his dilemma while enjoying it at the same time. Though the film touches on serious subjects, it does so in a light, unthreatening way, taking the stereotypes both of Jews and Muslims and turning them on their heads. Baddiel says, “It was important to me that if there were going to be jokes about Jews and Israel, there had to be jokes about Muslims and Pakistan. Part of the whole point of the movie is to say that being frightened about making jokes about a culture is a type of racism. All cultures should be allowed into the realm of humour. “

So it was with reluctance that I watched the second film on my list, “Four Lions”, a farce on the idea of British jihad, because only the night before terrorists had attacked the CID building in downtown Karachi, starting off a gun battle before using a thousand kilograms of explosives to destroy the entire compound. After such an event, what could possibly be funny about terrorism? And why would you really want to watch a movie that treats terrorists as anything other than monsters?

But “Four Lions” is a movie by the inimitable Chris Morris, the British satirist behind cult hit shows “Brass Eye” and “The Day Today”. Morris is known for delivering boldness, honesty, and controversy, and for those reasons his films are not to be missed. If you’ve got the stomach for it, that is, because Morris spares no one and nothing in this movie that incorporates screwball comedy, dark humor, blistering dialogues, and hilarious set pieces to show that “jihad isn’t just about ideology, sometimes it’s about idiots”.

The movie is based on Morris’s own research: he spent three years talking to terrorism experts, police, the secret service, and imams, as well as ordinary Muslims. “These cells have the same group dynamics as bachelor parties and five-a-side basketball teams. Plans are upset by arguments, egos, testosterone and idiocy,” says Morris on the official Web site for Drafthouse Films. The ensemble cast is utterly convincing as cold-blooded would-be murderers who like pop music and buxom women. The film’s brilliance, we soon see, lies in how it weaves together farce and tragicomedy.

The film covers four would-be British Muslim jihadis, ordinary lads born and bred in Sheffield, complete with broad Yorkshire accents, roots in the community and loving families. Omar (Riz Ahmed) is the smartest one, and the ringleader; Waj (Kavyan Novak) and Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), infinitely stupider, trust him and follow him blindly. The loose canon in the set is Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a British Muslim convert, who goes by the name of Assam Al-Brittani and wants to usurp control of the group from Omar.

The four of them plan to attend a training camp in Pakistan with the aim of becoming true Mujahideen, then returning to Britain and blowing something up for the cause. What? They don’t know. Why? Well, they’re not too clear about that either. How is the only thing they seem to have down: after Omar and Waj come back from Pakistan, having failed spectacularly at their Mujahideen training, they gather bottles of peroxide and bleach and make plans to suicide bomb the London Marathon.

The premise doesn’t sound terribly funny, but it’s the way Morris sets up the situations that induces the laughter – and not all of it is guilt-free. Omar is a security guard at a mall with a wife and son who not only know about his plans for martyrdom but support him as if he were the star player on a football team. Waj is handsome but stupid, while Faisal borders on the mentally handicapped, but both are endearing in the way they put all their faith in their mission, even if they don’t understand it: Faisal spends his time training crows to be suicide bombers and Waj needs to take pictures of his face with his mobile phone to figure out what he’s feeling.

They manage to attract a fifth member, Hassan (Arsher Ali), a smart media studies student who specializes in impromptu performance art with a jihadi twist. While they argue over who’s in control of the mission, they show varying degrees of idiocy, lunacy, loyalty and brotherhood. But it’s Barry’s character who keeps doggedly pushing them towards their goal when they waver. His pronouncements of how jihadi mentality is of the pick’n’mix variety, with hideous inconsistencies and contradictions: “Your father ever buy a Jaffa orange, mate? Yes? Then he’s funding nukes for Israel. He’s a Jew.”

The jihadis’ insistence on making a statement through violence contrasts with the Muslim prayer group in the same neighborhood, whose leader keeps trying to convince Omar that terrorism is unIslamic. Omar shows contempt for this peaceful message, supported by hadiths and Quranic verses that Omar dismisses out of hand as being solely for wimps and losers (although his language is much more colorful than mine when making this point).

But there’s no moral relativism here: anyone and everyone can end up a target or a victim of jihadists, including the jihadists themselves. The film moves towards its conclusion, which I won’t give away here, but I will say this: it stops being funny when people start dying, and becomes strangely poignant, especially when you realize the people you’re feeling sorry for are the ones that you think have no morals, no religion, no humanity.

Also low-budget at £2.5 million, “Four Lions” has so far taken in £3 million at the British box office. Still it had a tough time finding a US distributor because of its “controversial” nature, despite a strong showing at the Sundance Film Festival. It is now being released in the US by Draft House Films through a 10-city promotional screening tour which began in mid-October.

In the final analysis, “The Infidel” is harmless entertainment while “Four Lions” leaves you with the taste of ashes in your mouth. Don’t watch either if you’re convinced that Muslims know it all: only watch these movies if you are ready to face the fact that we’re as foolish, flawed, and ultimately confused as the rest of humanity. And then, too, only if you’re brave enough to laugh about it.

Bina Shah is an author based in Karachi