My guess is that most gays viewing Bruno will enjoy watching everyone else’s discomfort at Baron Cohen’s often nude slapstick. It’s a hang-up they just don’t have. Baron Cohen’s last hit movie Borat featured an extended naked fight scene between himself and the morbidly obese Ken Davitian. It’s easily the funniest scene in any movie of the past 25 years. The fight is perfectly choreographed to make nearly every position the two sword-fighting comedians wind up in an overtly sexual one. It’s brilliant slapstick, but in the end it’s just two naked guys rolling around a hotel room, and if you want to argue that it is hardly Swiftian-like satire, I’ll agree with you as long as you admit that it’s drop dead hilarious, and Bruno features a call-back to that scene that is nearly just as funny.
Bruno does a good job of parodying the average American’s unease with flamboyant gay activity, but I’d be hard pressed to argue that this was its true intent. I’m not a redneck, but if anyone woke me up in the middle of the night stark naked, claiming that a bear ate all of his possessions except for two unused condoms, I’d be pretty freaked out too.
Sure, Ron Paul runs out of Bruno’s hotel room calling him a queer after Baron Cohen disrobes and makes his character’s intentions to make a sex tape blatantly known, but frankly, who wouldn’t? Sean Penn starred in Milk, and if Baron Cohen had pulled this on Penn, the exact same thing would have happened.
Interviewing Paula Abdul as she sits on a man who looks a bit undocumented is brilliant, but then again who didn't already know that Paula Abdul was obliviously nuts?
In the end, Bruno really doesn’t really say much about America other than that nearly every last one of us has some heebee jeebies about penises and gay sex. If you ignore all the debate about what it all means, a few things about Baron Cohen’s talent remain. The man is absurdly fearless in a way perhaps only Andy Kauffman could ever have dreamed about; he’s taken the ability to create vibrant, fully-formed, comic characters to the next level; and without a doubt he deserves a special Oscar for being able to simulate four minutes or so of fellatio on the dead half of Milli Vanilli in front of a psychic and not once come close to doing what everyone in the audience is guilty of — busting a gut.
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