The king of the mockumentary world, director Christopher Guest (BEST IN SHOW and WAITING FOR GUFFMAN), is back to delight us with another of his pseudo-serious non-documentaries. In A MIGHTY WIND, he's out to skewer the old folk music world so popular back in the sixties. If your audience is like ours, laughter will go off like random fireworks since the script's mile-a-minute humor means that what works for one person will likely be a dud for another. But I guarantee that your personal mean time between laughs will be small. Surprisingly, the only character than never works is a brain-fried singer, played by Guest's co-writer Eugene Levy.

The setup for this folk music roast is a tribute concert to a dead music promoter. His son, played by Bob Balaban, has just two weeks to reassemble three big acts -- The Folksmen (Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer), The New Main Street Singers (John Michael Higgins, Jane Lynch, Parker Posey, etc.) and Mitch & Mickey (Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara) -- so that they can perform live at New York's famous Town Hall. You'll probably recognize who the groups are patterned after and which real hall is used. The music is fun with just the right mix of varying quality. You might actually want to buy the movie's CD since it's so full of amateurish and infectious enthusiasm.

The groups' idiotic smiles alone are almost worth the price of admission. When they aren't singing, the band members tell their life stories. One of The New Main Street Singers confesses, "There was abuse in my family, but mostly of a musical nature." His wife, also a member of the group, started off not in music but in "short films." Being willing to do "this thing" that other women wouldn't, she eventually worked her way up to full-length films, the last being NOT SO TINY TIM. After meeting her husband, they formed a new color-based religion, but I don't have time to get into that subtheme.

It's hard to figure out when I laughed the most, but perhaps it was the time one brainless brunette with enormous breasts was asked if she liked model trains. Why, of course, she did. "Thank god for model trains," she remarked sincerely. "If they didn't have them, they would have never gotten the idea for big trains."

A MIGHTY WIND runs 1:27. It is rated PG-13 for "sex-related humor" and would be acceptable for kids around 11 and up.