HE flew through the air with the greatest of — well, if not exactly ease, at least accuracy.
The first thing Eminem, lolling among his dudes at a music awards bash, saw was Sacha Baron Cohen’s G-string-clad backside hurtling towards him. A look of horror spread over the rapper’s doughy features but only until those features vanished into Baron Cohen’s crotch.
Splat! Another one bites the … but let’s not go into the details. The recent stunt was a classic piece of Baron Cohenism. It had colour, ingenuity, shock value and, so it seemed to almost everybody watching, a victim incapable of seeing the joke. The muffled whimperings from the spot where Eminem had last been seen soon turned into a furious protest, followed by the rapper storming out with his entourage. Only when the laughing stopped did anyone seriously begin to question whether it could all have been for real.
Now that we know it probably wasn’t, another question arises: does that make it any less funny? At the core of Baron Cohen’s outrageousness lies a peculiar strain of comic uncertainty. How much of him is an act? What do his characters represent? Should we find him as entertaining as we do?
Monday sees the Australian launch of the comedian’s new film, Brüno, in which he plays a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion pundit. A taste of what to expect can be found in a recent edition of marie claire magazine, in which Brüno provides a personal A-Z of his fashion knowledge: A is for Austria “where people are raised to try und achieve ze Austrian dream – find a job, get a dungeon und raise a family in it”. L is for “Little black child … thanks to Madonna … it’s zis season’s vardrobe essential”.
The movie has not been without its problems. Some have reported that Baron Cohen wanted to call it “Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America For The Purpose Of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable In The Presence Of A Gay Foreigner In A Mesh T-Shirt”, which Universal Studios sniffily rejected.
Then, close to the film’s release, the production was hit by a lawsuit from a woman in California who claims she was left in a wheelchair after being tricked into taking part in a spoof bingo game. The suit, brought by Rachel Olsen, claims “Brüno”, whom it describes as “an extreme, outrageous, offensive caricature of a gay man dressed in sexually revealing clothing with an Austrian accent … offensively touched, pushed and battered her” when she tried to wrest back the bingo caller’s microphone, resulting in her falling to the ground.
The assault, claims the suit, was abetted by several camera operators who “attacked [her] for a period of one to five minutes to intentionally create a dramatic emotional response … while [they] recorded her humiliation and embarrassment”.
Universal hopes the film will match the success of Borat, Baron Cohen’s surprise 2006 box office sensation that grossed more than $260 million worldwide. The studio, though, has adopted a low-key approach to the release. The star is slated to attend the premiere at Sydney’s State Theatre. However, there has been little advertising and beyond the revelation that Brüno gatecrashes the Paris and Milan fashion shows and tricks Paula Abdul into accepting “an Austrian TV fashion award”, little of the plot has been disclosed.
Abdul ruefully recalls: “I was greeted by this futuristic dude with a mohawk and he’s flaming. I walk in and there was no furniture except a chair. And this guy Brüno introduces himself. He snaps his fingers and says, ‘gardeners’. And these two Mexican guys come in and they drop down to all fours. I see him paying them like 10 bucks.”
The singer says things turned “uncomfortable” when Baron Cohen kicked one of the Mexicans. “I said: ‘Get me out of here. This is not funny, this is discrimination. This is abusive stuff going on here.”‘
Of course, it isn’t only Abdul who thinks so. For every memorable Baron Cohen gag there is a mug on the receiving end and there are enough of these to raise the question of where comedy ends and cruelty begins.
“In Kazakhstan,” claimed Borat, in his role as a Kazakh television reporter, “the favourite hobbies are disco dancing, archery, rape and table tennis.” The country’s government didn’t quite get the joke. Nor did the inhabitants of a village in Romania who claimed the film had portrayed them as “savages” and then barely paid them.
Baron Cohen’s status as a chattering-class darling allows him to get away with send-ups of blacks, Jews, gays and the raggedy of the Second World.
This, we have to realise, is sophisticated humour, weapons-grade satire or, as the man himself puts it, “a dramatic demonstration of how racism feeds on dumb conformity as much as rabid bigotry”.
It is hard to press Baron Cohen on the point. As British comedy’s foremost enigma, he rarely gives interviews and guards his privacy so closely his publicists once issued a statement denying he had attended a party.
He lives, following his success in the US, in a guarded, $20 million house in Los Angeles, with his Australian actress fiancee, Isla Fisher. “He’s protecting the product,” says Larry Charles, the director of Brüno and Borat. Yet there’s more to it than that.
Those who know Baron Cohen describe him as clever, likeable and sensitive but shaped heavily by his upbringing in an observant, high-achieving Jewish family in Hammersmith, London.
He was the youngest of three brothers; his Israel-born mother teaches dance, while his father runs a menswear shop. His upbringing was comfortable enough for Sacha to attend Haberdashers’ Aske’s, a private school in Hertfordshire, before going to Cambridge, where he joined the Amateur Dramatic Club and a Jewish theatre group.
His parents hoped he would become an academic but the showbiz bug bit deep. He broke through with the character Ali G of the West Staines Massiv, a bling-laden “voice of da yoof” on Channel Four’s The 11 O’Clock Show. As a representative of misunderstood suburban youth, Ali G landed interviews with the likes of Mohamed Al-Fayed and the former speaker of the US House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was so taken in that when he heard he’d been hoaxed, he refused to believe it.
Ali G made Baron Cohen famous but when his first movie, Ali G Indahouse, was picketed by black activists labelling him “the new Al Jolson”, it gave him a taste of the sensitivities even “sophisticated” comedy can touch on.
He keeps quiet now. Lets his act do the talking. Apart, perhaps, from a few words with Eminem before the show.
From here.
