“Tonight,” says Guru Pitka (Mike Myers), addressing his adoring fans at his Indian ashram, “I want you to go from Nowhere to Now Here.” His lecture is about the only marginally funny sequence in a film which makes the Austin Powers franchise look like a masterpiece of manic comedy. What on earth has happened?

The Love Guru — which also stars Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake and Ben Kingsley as a cross-eyed Guru Tugginmypuddha, handing out chastity belts to all and sundry — seems to have virtually no script at all, but a number of set pieces which vie with each other for lack of wit, as if Myers is making the whole thing up as he goes along. Marco Schnabel, the director, who championed such films as Se7en, Boogie Nights and Pleasantville as president of New Line productions, should have known better than to let Myers rip without the aid of more than four or five decent jokes.

But then this story is so slight as to be non-existent. The ambitious Guru Pitka, once an American child left at the gates of an Indian ashram, arrives back in the States with the twin ambitions to appear on the Oprah Winfrey Show and to help the Toronto Maple Leaves ice hockey team undo the curse which has left them without a trophy since 1967.

It’s all made worse by the fact that almost all the jokes are about sexual organs, defecation and farting, with live elephants mating as the final straw. At one point Kingsley’s character makes his pupils duel with mops soaked in his own urine. If you think that’s funny, be my guest.