A documentary featuring George W. Bush, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Bill Maher, and Salma Hayek. Rating unavailable.

Is ignorance really bliss? Is a lack of basic comprehension skills the ticket to success in a too-complicated world? Will no smartness go unpunished? Those are the basic questions asked by Stupidity, a sometimes disturbing, mostly amusing, and overall very timely new documentary from Toronto filmmaker Albert Nerenberg.

With a dazzling, if occasionally numbing, array of old film clips, news and TV footage, staged sight gags, and sharp new interviews with people ranging from Noam Chomsky and Bill Maher to John Cleese and Salma Hayek (she talks about her unibrow in Frida), Stupidity makes the case that imbecility can be its own reward.

As the Canadian actors behind the metalhead mockumentary Fubar suggest, no-brainedness is an infantile state best, or most colourfully, expressed in the adult-copying state of adolescence. It's no mistake, then, that popular shows like MTV's Jackass (shown here in vomitous and glass-breaking excerpts) are aimed at our inner teenager. The appeal of Adam Sandler, as several observers point out, is that the naive, presexual child is meant to defeat smarty-pants grown-ups at every turn.

Nerenberg argues that the fact that Sandler is faking it leads directly up the path to the White House. A consensus is emerging that George W. Bush, like Sandler and Marilyn Monroe, is a wolf in dumb-ass clothing; that is, he's a shrewd, if inarticulate, manipulator who has cloaked himself in stupidity so that, as Moore puts it, "The ignorant can claim him as one of theirs." For evidence, recall the campaign against "know-it-all" Al Gore. Take that, you stuffy grown-ups!

The slack-jawed are a sizable, growing, and audibly grunting minority. But as the film insistently repeats throughout its engaging 70 minutes, the word stupid--while staking out turf as one of the worst swear words in the English language--resists easy definition. Even Albert Einstein was baffled by it; he once declared that ignorance was as limitless as the universe, only he wasn't sure about the universe.