Ricky Gervais is not who you think he is. If you think he is just that lovably cherubic and brilliant comic who invented "The Office" across the pond — the one with all those pitilessly self-deprecating jokes, greased-up hair and snaggle-toothed evidence of British dentistry — forget it.

The Invention of Lying

Three Stars (Out of four)

Rated: PG-13

Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Rob Lowe, Jonah Hill and Fionnula Flanagan in Gervais and Mathew Robinsons comic fable about a truth-telling world where one little guy starts making up a lot of whoppers. Opening Friday in area theaters.

Look at Time magazine's "Short List" of Gervais' own current enthusiasms in its Oct. 5 issue. Here is what currently turns Ricky on: "Design Genius" Jonathan Ive and the iPhone, author Karl Pilkington, Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi, painter Clive McCartney and comedian Louis C. K.

Maybe that isn't a vehement obscurantist's list, but it sure is an unabashed intellectual's. There isn't an ounce of "I'm just an ordinary bloke like everyone else" on it — none of that "I'm fat and unattractive but good-hearted" stuff that his comedy depends on.

And that includes his very funny new movie, "The Invention of Lying," which — no matter what you may have read — is not some angry atheist stink bomb lobbed into your local megaplex to inflame fundamentalists. It is, rather, a very gentle and very funny little fable on how religion might have been invented.

So don't expect jokes from the militant, sneering branch of The New Atheism (a la best-selling writer Christopher Hitchens). Dont even expect the kind of God-baiting that the Monty Python boys became so famous for in "The Life of Brian."

This, so help me, is a sweetly funny Thurberesque fable about a world where everybody ALWAYS tells the truth until one chubby fellow (guess who?) discovers that there are advantages if he just starts saying things ... that ... just ... arent ... so.

Hes such a compassionate, lovely little guy that he invents the idea of heaven to comfort his old, frightened, ailing mother.

He becomes "the man who knows what happens after you die." Thats right. He even comes down to his people to reveal the truth to them that was given to him to read on two large Pizza Hut box tops.

There will be free ice cream for everyone after you check out. And theres a benign Big Guy. And. . .

Well, you get the idea.

That's really only when the film is almost over, though.

What happens before in the world of "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" is whats so delightful and so benevolently funny.

Like this, for instance: Ricky, a self-described "loser," arrives to pick up his date for the evening, who is played by Jennifer Garner.

She comes to the door and says, "Youre early. I was just masturbating." In a flash, she admits to him, "I dont find you attractive."

At dinner, the waiter comes over and says, "Im very embarrassed to work here." Then he turns to Garner and, with an admirably firm grasp of the obvious, says, "Youre very pretty."

I think you get the idea there, too.

In Jim Carreys "Liar, Liar," only he was incapable of an unexpressed thought. Here, it's everyone.

All of this is worked out over the next hour or so. Some of the details are wonderfully ingenious, some are just glue to get the fable from one place to the next.

But it's a funny little movie. Gervais really is one of the better things to happen to the comedy world in the past decade and, yes, so too is Jennifer Garner (any fool can see how gorgeous she is. She's turned, though, into a delectable comic actress with rare sweetness and even rarer goofiness.)

A lot of smart and clever performers took small parts in this movie — Jason Bateman, Rob Lowe, Jonah Hill among them. Good for them all. Surely, it seems to me, there are points in heaven for saying "yes" to Ricky Gervais when he calls.

I do wish the ending hadn't been such corn mush.

This smart little fable wallows at the end in a kind of absurd, modern-era piety of its own: That, as the Beatles at their worst so fatuously once put it, "all you need is love."

But then the ending of "The Invention of Lying" is probably the only one any self-respecting Hollywood movie executive would sign off on.

Too bad.

I'd love to know what Ricky might have come up with if he could have winged it completely and gone wherever his very surprising self wanted.