In a pivotal scene early in Oscar award-winning Tsotsi, lightning flashes across the sky and over its titular figure -- a young man in one strobe-flare, a boy in the next. The young man is someone out of scare-headlines about post-apartheid South Africa -- a hardened street criminal from the townships, fresh from a vicious murder and an assault on a fellow gang member. The image of the boy that appears a split-second later, viewers learn over the course of Gavin Hood's wrenching film, is a flashback to none other than Tsotsi (“thug”) himself, before he left behind the name his mother gave him and took up his street moniker.

What is funny -- and why? A fat man and a thin one trying to move a piano? A bug-eyed freak and his teddy bear? Pratfalls, poop jokes, practical jokes, spun-out stories of laughed-through pain, drag-queen song and dance? What does what we find amusing say about who we are -- as individuals, societies, and even nations?

The title of the comedian Albert Brooks' film Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World seems to promise such probings both philosophical and funny. But like so many other American quest-films or movies about Americans abroad -- Roger & Me, Lost In Translation -- Brooks seems to find little but his own irritating self.