“Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World” is an excellent satire of the bureaucracy that plagues the U.S. government. Like many government commissions that actually exist, the exploration committee in the film sets out to learn what it should have known from the beginning: “Muslims” don’t like Albert Brooks’s stand-up act, either.

The realization is more unfortunate considering how much potential Mr. Brooks and his film have squandered. In the post-September 11 world, we in the West would love to find a common link to bridge the divide between our predominantly Judeo-Christian culture and the dominant Muslim culture of the Middle East.

Trying to understand Muslims through laughter seems a novel – and worthwhile – approach. As Fred Dalton Thompson (playing himself heading the exploration committee) says in the beginning of the film, the government’s gone about it in all the normal ways – “spying and fighting.” It’s time to try something new.

The committee decides to send Mr. Brooks (playing an alternate version of himself) to India and Pakistan to find out once and for all, “What makes Muslims laugh?” When Mr. Brooks asks why he was chosen over other comedians for such a significant task, he is told bluntly: “Quite frankly, our first few choices were working.”

Mr. Brooks handles such candid self-satirizing deftly, and sets the audience up for what could be a candid exploration of the Middle East, but once he boards the plane for India, all hopes of that are lost. For starters, he is headed to India. And as Mr. Brooks asks early on: “Isn’t India Hindu?”

It may have 150,000 Muslims, but a country that exports the cultural phenomenon of Bollywood and more white-collar workers to the United States than we’d like to admit should have the least perceptible culture gap of any country with a large Muslim population.

It is a cheap maneuver for a film that purports to learn something about a culture so foreign to us, but filming in a more volatile country obviously would be more dangerous to the crew. Besides, “Looking for Comedy” is not really about the Middle East; it’s about finding a straight man for Mr. Brooks’s embarrassing antics. The people of India are given that thankless task.

While a few culture-clash jokes strike the right note (especially those involving the call center next to his office in Delhi), Mr. Brooks is too obsessed with the cliche of the stupid American abroad to learn something from his environs. His research method for his task entails approaching strangers and asking them what they think is funny. He seldom gets an answer, and most frequently ends up telling one of his tired old jokes.

The punch line to all of the funny one-liners and shots at Mr. Brooks’s comedic skills are predicated on him excelling at what he’s been hired to do. But when we finally get to see him in action during a large stand-up performance, Mr. Brooks looks startlingly like the thing everyone has insinuated he was from the beginning – a failed comic.

He supposedly redeems himself by presenting the same jokes to a group of Pakistanis who appreciate Western humor, but chances are the film’s audiences won’t be as stoned as this group of Pakistanis, and they certainly won’t be laughing during his encore performance.

Despite the title of Mr. Brooks’s film – which turned off the original distributor because it used the controversial word “Muslim” – “Looking for Comedy” never bothers to impart anything about Muslims or the Middle East. The film is not interested in exploring anything other than Mr. Brooks’s shortcomings as a performer.

And what can you possibly learn from a culture by pushing its people to admit they don’t like bad comedy?

***

Ethan Embry may be the sexiest pizza boy since Patrick Dempsey in “Loverboy.” Mr. Embry plays aging pizza delivery guy-political activist Matt Firenze, who has a near-religious devotion to pizza. Matt may be getting old for his job, but he has delivery down to an art. The people on his route (mostly female) adore him, and he makes excellent eye candy in a tank top.

On one of his deliveries, he encounters young Cara-Ethyl (Kylie Sparks) at her poorly attended 18th-birthday party and decides to rescue her from a night with her blind mother (hilariously played by Julie Hagerty). As they progress through Matt’s deliveries for the night, they meet an amusing cast of eccentrics and learn lessons of varying obviousness from each other.

Despite the many conquests and friendships his charms and delivery route have allowed him, Matt is not entirely satisfied being a 30-something delivery guy. Mr. Embry seems to have matured past the chipmunk eagerness he displayed in films such as “Empire Records” and “Can’t Hardly Wait.” He gives Matt an inherently likable and endearing personality.

Young Cara-Ethyl, an overweight high school student, is a sweet but lonesome girl who yearns desperately for friendship. She displays more weird quirks and personality hiccups than one would think a caged home-schooler could acquire, but Ms. Sparks shoulders this heavy burden of indignities with a good deal of grace.

Despite more than a few forced scenes and some embarrassing low budget-production gaffs (images of swirling pizzas often serve as transitions between scenes), “Pizza” tells an enjoyable story of a friendship between two dissatisfied suburban souls.

***

“On the Outs,” a fiction film from the documentary makers Lori Silverbush and Michael Skolnik, chronicles the lives of three underprivileged Jersey City women – a crack addict, a pregnant teen, and a drug dealer – who find themselves incarcerated together. The film benefits from a strong cast (led by the searing Judy Marte), a tragic storyline, and documentary-like realism, but none of these assets distracts from the film’s overwhelming similarities to an after-school special.