Half a Laugh

...Omer," says the cell's leader, "they don't call me the Torturer because I don't like to torture people...

...But even as he was filming, a real-life Hasidic Jew named Matthew Miller—who calls himself Matisyahu—has become a top-selling reggae rapper, song-spieling in a Jamaican accent while wearing a four-fringed garment and sporting earlocks...

...This bizarre piece of intelligence information conjured up the image of Zubay-dah and bin Laden sitting in a cave in Afghanistan watching a bootleg DVD of the dreadful 1998 Matthew Broderick movie on a late-model laptop...

...Those poor creatures aren't responsible for the injuries that cause their halting and tortured gait, whereas the dull, plodding, and painfully unfunny nature of the Bush and Idol scenes in American Dreamz are solely and exclusively the responsibility of the movie's writer-director, Paul Weitz, and Universal Pictures, which put up the cash for the film...

...A very deep sleeper, though, because he was sent to California by his terror masters after washing out during his basic training at an al Qaeda camp...

...But if Ernst Lubitsch could do it with Nazis in the middle of World War II with To Be or Not to Be— a movie that features a popinjay colonel who proudly calls himself "Concentration Camp" Erhard—then surely we can tolerate some of the same during the war on terror...

...The comedy here arises from the difficulty that comes with trying to untangle the ironies that attend the very real threat posed by Islamo-fascism: The use of the most up-to-date methods of the Information Age in pursuit of a return to 1683...

...This is funny for the same reason the president jokes are not—because it's new and fresh and even a bit shocking...

...Let's shoot this puppy...

...Omer says he doesn't want to do it...

...The show goes looking for a flamboyantly gay teenage Arab kid in Orange County named Iqbal who has a recording studio set up in his basement...

...Meanwhile, back in the training camp, al Qaeda terrorists are watching Omer and calling in to vote for him...

...Rewind the TiVo...

...he shouts when Omer fires a gun into the roof of a mud hut, raining debris all over the place...

...The blithering-idiot Bush hit its high-water mark with Will Ferrell squinting into the camera and saying "strategery" on Saturday Night Live almost six years ago...

...Come on...

...Part of the thrill of good satire is the shock of seeing something done that really shouldn't be done, like turning al Qaeda into a subject of ridicule and sport...

...That kind of incongruity is at the heart of all good comedy, which has the power to shock in part because it offers an unexpected perspective on things...

...Too bad Weitz couldn't have done the same with his wildly tired Bush stereotype...

...Weitz has come up with John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic and author of the forthcoming Can She Be Stopped...

...That's also why Weitz and a stunning young sketch comic named Tony Yalda are able to put such a fresh spin on the wildly tired stereotype of the screaming show queen by making him a deracinated Iraqi mall rat...

...one genuinely clever notion: That in an effort to recruit a diverse crew of contestants, the American Idol knockoff here decides it needs an Arab...

...But when Omer wows the audience with his rendition of "My Way," the cell leader leans over to one of his crew and murmurs, "A very bold song choice...

...If he had, American Dreamz would have been two-thirds of something terrific...

...by JOHN PODHORETZ Here are some things that aren't very funny, though they might have been once upon a time: Jokes about how dumb President Bush is, and parodies of television shows that are already parodies of themselves...

...And it's impossible to make clever fun of a program like American Idol when each season of the actual show features dozens of hilariously bad performers happily making fools of themselves for our viewing pleasure...

...American Dreamz isn't a complete trip to the glue factory because, intermittently, the lame horse finds itself standing strong on one powerful leg...

...Omer isn't really al Qaeda material because he likes to sit in his tent late at night and dance to Broadway show tunes, so he gets shipped off to America so the terrorists can be rid of him...

...He clearly thought he had hit the comic mother lode with his invention of a soul-singing Hasidic Jew named Sholem Glickstein who makes it to the American Idol finals along with Omer...

...But wait...

...American show business is now officially beyond parody...

...We see a director in a burnoose and thick beard who keeps getting frustrated with his inability to get good footage for his terrorist training video...

...But Iqbal is out at the mall when the show's producers arrive, and they end up choosing his cousin, Omer...

...Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah reportedly told American interrogators that Bin Laden wanted to bring down "the bridge in the Godzilla movie," by which he meant the Brooklyn Bridge...

...With Omer, his relatives, and al Qaeda, Weitz hits a rich and heretofore untapped comic vein...

...a bin Laden lookalike commands...

...When Omer is told by members of his sleeper cell that he is to blow up the president live on television, they do so while sitting uncomfortably in his uncle's rococco hot tub...

...What they don't know is that Omer is a sleeper al Qaeda agent...

...Weitz never had a chance at an unqualified success, because he made the mistake of choosing show business as a satirical target...

...To describe the scenes in the new satirical movie American Dreamz, in which a stupid president from Texas ends up as an American Idol judge, as "lame" would be an insult to injured horses everywhere...