National Public Radio’s Terry Gross interviewed Mike Myers a few days before “The Love Guru” came out and set up the interview by saying that Myers had created some very funny characters over the years. Gross’s skill with words allowed her to delicately omit what she thought of his latest creation. They spent most of the time talking about Austin Powers. But in the few moments they did talk about the movie, Myers’ explanation of how he gradually came up with the Guru Pitka character after his father died in 1991 was brilliant, deep and held an amazing potential for comedy.

Every single person I talked to who saw this movie gave it the kind of resounding thumbs down you’d expect from a Dane Cook night of improv. I’m glad I didn’t listen to them. To paraphrase Dr. Evil, “The Love Guru” is the kind of funny “that only the genius possess and the insane lament.”

The plot of “The Love Guru” is an inconsequential arc — Guru Pitka tries to surpass Deepak Chopra’s fame by saving the marriage of a superstar hockey player, whose wife has run off with a Quebecois mimbo (Justin Timberlake, whose dedication to self-deprecating comedy is rare and backed up by real talent). In the process, Pitka discovers the meaning of love. In anyone else’s hands, it would be a hollow, crass waste of time — a neti pot turned tea pot? Puerile. A sportscaster addicted to psychedelics and Frangelico? Cheap. Jessica Alba as token love interest and Justin Timberlake as a boy toy? Predictable. Commercialized Eastern philosophy suckering the masses? Cynical.

It should be a turkey — Myers can sometimes pander to the lowest common denominator (remember “Fat Bastard?”) but on the whole, it’s a 17-stuffed-bird Roti Sans Pareil — “a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an Ortolan Bunting and a Garden Warbler,” according to Wikipedia. “The final bird is small enough that it can be stuffed with a single olive.”

It’s a kind of comedic color blindness to only see the elephant sex and big-dick jokes and Verne Troyer being called a Keebler Elf — and to miss straitlaced Stephen Colbert addicted to peyote, Timberlake parodying pop-star sincerity through Celine Dion covers and Alba channeling the wide-eyed, intricate dances of Bollywood (even if you can’t tell your “Jaan Pehechan Ho” from your “Benny Lava”). The best part is how Myers skewers the breathy, serene, Whole Foods yoga aisle spirituality of upper middle-class America. It’s a fitting roast for anyone who, after tragedy or death, has had someone try to forcibly enlighten them as to how the Bara people of southern Madagascar “set up different containers for grieving” when someone dies. (Those people don’t take kindly if you suggest you prefer a different container, the kind that holds whiskey, preferably in a dank bar with plenty of Pogues on the jukebox that will let you break your fist on the wall if you want.)

Myers doesn’t actually trash the Eastern stuff — just the way it can get commercialized and turned to childish drivel. As he says, “The Love Guru” is “a very silly delivery system for some of the ideas I actually believe in.”

“There’s nothing so painful that it can’t be laughed at eventually,” Myers told NPR. “The state of grace is having that detachment to laugh at those kind of things … it gives dignity to the proceedings.”

And although its uproarious, down-to-earth grace and dignity really are at the heart of “The Love Guru,” I understand why it got panned. If you walk in expecting Ray Romano and end up with the Marx Brothers, it’s going to go over your head. It can be uncomfortable to be around someone who’s smarter than you — and Mike Myers is definitely smarter than all of us.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.