As the houselights dimmed, an expectant hush fell over the crowd. And never lifted. It was like being in an audience consisting entirely of mutes and mimes.

Swamis and maharishis are (potentially funny) people, too -- no more lampoon-proof than priests, rabbis or imams. But with "The Love Guru," multi-talented mega-comic Mike Myers has achieved the impossible: a comedy that's unfunny in general and in every particular.

Myers plays Guru Pitka, a Yankee raised on an ashram in India. His dharma nonsense includes power-point presentations on the words "intimacy" ("Into Me I See") and "nowhere" ("Now Here!"). Currently, he is the world's second-biggest guru -- after Deepak Chopra. With a burning, jealous desire to appear on "Oprah," he and his Faithful Indian Companion Rajneesh (Manu Narayan, who grew up in Delmont) are lured back to the States by the lucrative prospects of its self-help business.

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'The Love Guru'

1 star = Awful
Ratings explained

• Starring: Mike Myers, Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake.
• Rating: PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, language, comic violence and drug references.
• Web site: www.LoveGuruMovie.com

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There, Guru Pitka's first spiritual challenge is to restore romantic and professional bliss to Toronto Maple Leafs hockey star Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco), whose foxy wife (Megan Good) has dumped him for rival star Jacques Le Coq Grande (Justin Timberlake). Jessica Alba plays the team's unpopular owner. Its head coach, Punch Cherkov, is played by dwarfish Verne Troyer, better known (and cast) as Dr. Evil's Mini-Me in the "Austin Powers" series.

All of them are dwarfed by the film's huge quantity and low quality of juvenile humor: more penile and testicular jokes than you can shake a truss at, including: "If your Uncle Jack helped you off an elephant, would you help your Uncle Jack off an elephant?" (Speaking of which, there's an actual elephant-coupling scene.)

Along the way, there are a few mildly amusing spoofs of Bollywood song-and-dance numbers (lyrics: "Surely you are a goddess who fills my heart with lugubrious recalcitrance"), plus parodies of Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" and Steve Miller's "Joker," as well as a nice Mike and Manu guitar-sitar duet. Had its primary comic focus been musical rather than scatological, "Love Guru" might have swum instead of sunk.

The only explanation for throwing hockey and the Maple Leafs into this lethal mix is that Myers loves the game and lives in Toronto -- i.e., a Canadian's desire to shoot, shuck and jive for six weeks in Canada.

I'm a big fan of Myers' "Wayne's World," his inspired Linda Richman and Austin Powers characters, and his "So I Married an Axe Murderer." But he falls flat here, taking the likes of Ben Kingsley, Kanye West, Val Kilmer and Jessica Simpson (embarrassing themselves in minor roles) along with him. Only Stephen Colbert's drug-crazed sports broadcaster and Tonto-like sidekick Narayan come away unscathed.

Marco Schnabel, who was second-unit director on all three of the Austin Powers movies, is an adoring fan and pal of Myers. This is Schnabel's feature-film debut -- and, it is hoped, swan song. He should have chosen self-immolation, in protest, rather than accept this assignment. The slapstick mess of a script by Myers and Graham Gordy is as ethnist-racist as it gets, doing for Indian sensibilities what the Stepin Fetchit flicks did for African Americans.

Remember the audience's stunned silence that greeted "Springtime for Hitler" in "The Producers"? That collective spell of disbelief -- how could anything be so appallingly tasteless? -- was followed by a delayed realization of how funny it was.

In "Love Guru," stupefaction reigns and remains, from beginning to end.