JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE'S GIANT COCK WALKS INTO A BAR...

Do you like dick jokes?

Do you really like dick jokes?

Then boy, does Mike Myers have a movie for you.

I don't mean to say that there's anything wrong with dick jokes. Fact is, I've enjoyed a dick joke in my day. But there are dick jokes and then there are good dick jokes, and The Love Guru hasn't got too many of the latter. It has some, but only because when you have as many dick jokes as The Love Guru has, simple math dictates that at least a few of them have to work.

The Love Guru finds Myers playing the guru Maurice Pitka, an American who traveled to India in the mid-'70s to study on the famed guru Tugginmypudha - go ahead, say it out loud. Not one of the good ones, by the way. Tugginmypudha is played by Ben Kingsley, who is pretty much as far from Gandhi as he will ever be, so let's just get that out of our systems right now: yes, Sir Ben Kingsley plays a cross-eyed guru named Tugginmypudha, who makes his students fight with mops dunked in stagnant urine.

In the intervening decades, Pitka has established himself as the world's second most successful selp-help guru behind only his fellow student, Deepak Chopra (who gamely puts in a cameo, and probably - probably - wins The Love Guru's coveted "Most Embarrassing" award). In his life-long quest to end up on Oprah Winfrey's television show and become the new biggest fake guru in the world, Pitka agrees to help the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team out by patching up the marriage of their star player, Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco, an extremely gifted comic actor who already made a fool of himself earlier this year in Baby Mama), after his wife leaves him for the famed Québécois player Jacques "Le Coq" Grande (Justin Timberlake). Along the way, Pitka falls head over heels for the Maple Leafs' cursed owner, Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba), and must find his own inner peace in order to remove the chastity belt placed on him at a young age when he entered training.

I don't know why I just recapped the plot. I could as well have said: Mike Myers has an Indian accent and makes jokes about his dick, Timberlake's fake big dick, dicks in general, pop culture, and Verne Troyer's dwarfism.

Comedy being subjective, the rest of what I have to say should be taken with a big ol' grain of salt, but I must confess that I found the movie a little bit funny. Despite its already toxic reputation, it has probably 12 or 18 gags that really work, which may seem small but it's more than were in such recent comic train wrecks like Good Luck Chuck, Strange Wilderness or License to Wed. And not just "I'm laughing because it's not awful" jokes that work, but flat-out successful jokes, some of which come early enough in the film that it can't possibly just be that we're that starved for humor. There's a Bollywood parody that looks perfect and is written into the film well, there are a couple non sequiturs surprising enough to be funny, one of the three pop music parodies is pretty hard to find fault with, some grace notes involving Steven Colbert as a dope-fiend sportscaster are subtle and playful, a few odds and ends here and there are pretty clever, and as I've already pointed out, the law of averages demands that at least a few of the dick jokes work. Despite that, The Love Guru more than earns every morsel of vitriol hurled towards it, for the simple fact that while some of the jokes click, most of the jokes that fail, fail apocalyptically. Take the celebrated matter of Pitka's mantra, "Mariska Hargitay." As a quick one-off pop culture wink, it's not terrible, but when it's used something like thirty times in the first ten minutes, most of its charm as a joke dies pretty fast, and when Pitka actually comes to greet Mariska Hargitay herself, we enter the field of unheard of anti-funny, compounded by the fact that bless her, Hargitay isn't a household name, attested to by the fact that at her appearance, three separate people in the theater where I saw the film asked their seatmates, loud enough for the whole room to hear, "who is she?"

We could indeed go through the whole film, beat by beat, and deconstruct every gag that flops - the piss-mops would be a good second place to head - but I don't have the stamina and if you are like most people, you have already decided that there is no chance in hell that you're going to pay money to see The Love Guru. So let's cut right to the insanity: the jokes are so completely awful, and they take so long to get to their complete awfulness, that the film almost functions as an experiment in anti-comedy, like Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered is sometimes defended as being (I've never seen Freddy Got Fingered, and if Hell does not exist, I never shall). There is a scene where Pitka and Jane are sitting down to a meal. It is named something incoherently faux-Indian, and Pitka's long-suffering manservant Rajneesh (Manu Narayan, the most appealing person in the movie, despite the palpable self-loathing) starts cooking it; it looks precisely like testicles in a scrotum. Pitka and Jane both know it looks like testicles in a scrotum; every time Pitka speaks about it, he makes a transparent pun about "crushed nuts" or "safewords" or the like. And then he laughs loudly at himself. Oh my, does Pitka ever spend a lot of time laughing at his own jokes in The Love Guru, almost as much time laughing as speaking, and this is good; else there would be no laughter in the theater at all. So, back to the scene: the gag is "food that looks like testicles in a scrotum", and all three characters are in on it, and the joke goes on for about two minutes. Nothing about this scenario makes sense as humor-writing (it is a fact that jokes are less funny when the characters are in on them), but as a tossed-off piece of performance art, trying to explore the limits of just how much you can strangle the comedy out of a moment? It's genius, and the film is simply endless with experiments like that, always capped off by Pitka/Myer's smug, self-satisfied laugh. Can it be that The Love Guru is smarter than we are, and it's just a giant punking by director Marco Schnabel and co-writers Myers and Graham Gordy? Forcing the audience to confront what isn't funny, for so long and in such a systematic way, that out of desperation the anti-comedy starts to be funny? In that case, I have no choice:

10/10

Er, 2/10. I meant, 2/10