The Sacha Baron Cohen phenomenon has struck again. This time round, we were warned that gays, Austrians and fashionistas would be up the wall. There were indeed a few anxious peeps from some of these, generating helpful advance buzz for Bruno. Nonetheless, serious protest never really took off. After all, Baron Cohen's just so damn funny. Complain, and you'll look like either an uptight twit or a mittel-European ambassador. Still, if the whole thing's so unchallengeably hilarious, who's the butt of the joke?
According to Baron Cohen's many fawning admirers, the answer's obvious. Bigots. The unsophisticated might think he's mocking gays or Americans, but that only shows how unsophisticated they are. The whole point of his stunts is to bring out the latent intolerance that besmirches our society and expose it to the searing glare of ridicule. Yet, to discover that rednecks disapprove of homosexuality or that Israelis and Palestinians decline to sink their differences on demand is hardly a big deal. Something else must surely be going on. It is.
When my fellow cinemagoers roared with joy at Bruno's brilliant mime of gay intercourse with an absent partner, they weren't expressing anti-homophobic indignation. They were laughing at what gay people do to each other. So was I. Why not? Gay sex is funny. So is heterosexual sex. And when we cracked up at a Jerry Springer-style audience's naivety, we were tickled by their naivety, not righteously affronted by their opinions.
What's really funny, however, is the idea that boorish sniggering of this kind should entitle us to feel smugly superior to less enlightened folk. Not bad, Baron Cohen. Sunday redtops invite us to imagine we're reading about naughty antics out of concern for public decency. However, they don't succeed in persuading us that this is actually true.
Of course, we cannot be altogether sure that Baron Cohen endorses his supporters' claims for the worthiness of his efforts. It could just be that he's laughing not only at us, but at them as well. Unlike most of the movie world's leading lights, he doesn't choose to explain himself. When he agrees to be interviewed at all, he usually chooses to remain in character, thereby making fools not just of his media interlocutors but also of their readers and viewers.
This elusiveness helps him play a further trick on his patrons. It seems pretty clear that some of the setups in Bruno, as in Borat, were actually faked. Did you really believe in everything that took place at the swingers' party? Perhaps you'd like to know when you were being had? Well, tough. That's Baron Cohen's little secret. Since the broadcasting fakery scandals of 2007, viewers have been protected from deliberate deception. Baron Cohen, of course, is above such mundane constraints.
TV producers are also required to make it clear to programme participants what kind of production they're being asked to appear in. Baron Cohen, on the other hand, demands the right not only to cheat his victims but to bully and humiliate them as well. And all the while, as he indulges our vindictiveness, we're supposedly expected to imagine that we're somehow occupying the moral high ground.
Sometimes, Baron Cohen's targets almost get the better of him. I thought that the gay-converting pastor handled his tormentor with impressive skill and dignity. Perhaps, some of Bruno's other intended dupes managed to turn the tables, and the joke ended up being on Baron Cohen himself. If so, we'll never know. Any such incidents will doubtless have made their way swiftly to the cutting-room floor. Baron Cohen, after all, decides what goes in and what stays out, and if there's anything he wouldn't want us to see, we won't see it.
By all means let's laugh at Bruno and Baron Cohen's other creations. He is indeed pretty funny. But let's not kid ourselves. The joke's largely on us.
