on Brüno

done with fashion

1. In which it is revealed, or rather rerevealed, that Short Round is a snob.

I loved Da Ali G Show when it was on HBO in, what, 2002? 2003? I watched the first episode and was won over completely. And Borat was the best: Ali G was pretty consistently excellent, and Brüno had his moments (but only really picked up in Season Two), but it was Borat who blew the whole world right out of the water, funnywise. And I used to do a good Borat impression, too.

Doing a Borat impression pretty much stopped being cool acceptable on Nov. 3, 2006...or maybe even before that, whenever the first trailers for the movie aired. Why? Because as soon as everyone in America "discovered" Borat, like Borat was this brand-new thing, Borat was no longer a cool thing to like. To be fair (to myself), this is only half snobbery. The other half is the problem that what made Borat brilliant wasn't the accent but the things he said—and, more specifically, the things he said to real-life people, and the things he got them to say in response. In other words, simply doing a Borat impression—saying "I like" in that voice, for example—is the equivalent of saying "YEAH, BABY!" in an Austin Powers voice, contributing nothing to the general happiness of the human race and in fact all at once lowering Sacha Baron Cohen to a Mike Myers level* and lowering the general happiness of the human race to an Idiocracy level. By which I mean not the movie Idiocarcy, really, but rather the world of the movie Idiocracy. Whatever. There was something depressing about suddenly hearing Borat impressions all over the place, the lowest point coming when "he" showed up in the preview for one of those imbecile Friedberg–Seltzer catastrophes.

Anyway, the Borat movie was fine and had some very high points, but (like the Simpsons movie) was basically like a mediocre-to-fine episode of the show: whereas you'd want it to up the ante and to end up being the definitive Borat, instead I'd advise anyone to watch the show first and only check out the movie if you just can't get enough. On the show Borat gets an A+; in the movie, maybe a B+.

better on TV

2. In which we once again discuss irony.

Those lovable clowns at the ADL tried to give Sacha Baron Cohen a slap on the wrist about five years ago when Borat did the now-nearly-legendary "Throw the Jew Down the Well" number on the HBO show. While they acknowledged that SBC (a religious Jew so observant that, in the text of the not-Jewish character Ali G's commencement speech at Harvard, although it was otherwise entirely in character, he still felt he had to leave out the O when writing god) was in fact working to uncover and expose anti-Semitism, they still felt that he had done wrong because "the irony may have been lost on some of [his] audience."† Essentially what they are doing, there, is banning satire altogether on the theory that it is just too dangerous: because irony can be misunderstood, it must never be employed.

Now, irony is a tricky business, and complicated—I don't even mean junk irony; I mean the regular kind. I once had a long conversation with a brilliant schizophrenic on the subject and was given much food for thought, particularly having to do with the question of whether saying something when you mean something else is in fact in an important and very real way still saying the thing you don't mean. I'm not sure about that, and I'm sure that, in some cases and in some ways, irony does indeed serve the very forces it purports to challenge. (I have made an effort to stop using certain words for just that reason.) But that's truest when the irony is vague and imprecise; sometimes its aim is true, so to speak, and in those cases I do not think there's much ambiguity. Yes, some people might not get it, but is there anything in this world that everyone is going to get? Must everything be for everyone?

Anyway, because this is relevant (but not indentical) to the controversies about Brüno, let me just respond quickly on a blanket theoretical level:

First, I do not believe that it is the responsibility of comedians, television producers, filmmakers, writers, or anyone else‡ to make sure that their work and words are not misinterpreted by idiots.

Second, because irony is such an effective tool, banning its use because of possible collateral damage is like cutting off your nose to spite your face. [CLICHÉ]

Third, I do not in fact believe that the risk the ADL (and others) perceive here (and elsewhere) is real. More on this below.

only one of the series I could find online, not the funniest

3. In which we address the question, "Is Brüno a kind of gay minstrelsy?"

Call me a snob if you want to, but I do not believe that the majority of Borat's viewers appreciated the subtlety of the humor: I'd go so far as to say even that most of them liked (a) his quotable speech and (b) the gross-out humor, PERIOD. Americans are not particularly big on [real] irony. That said, the question of what the target of SBC's irony might be is somewhat more up in the air than what you might have gleaned from the critics' glibly argued (or regurgitated) claims.

The friend who first turned me on to the TV show argued that SBC was essentially targeting the kind of pseudo-multicultural junk tolerance that amounts effectively to massive condescension and whereby people of all political persuasions are inclined to treat foreigners as idiots and/or lunatics: in other words, the genius of Borat (and of Ali G, and of Brüno)—and a reason not to feel bad for the people who get duped—is that he gets people to go along with the most outrageous bullshit because they essentially don't have enough respect for him to sit up and say, "Hold on a second: what?" They talk to him the way they'd talk to a small child...or rather the way some adults would talk to a small child. And even when he's not interviewing unsuspecting citizens, the humor of the way he acts is all about making fun (pretty literally) of all sorts of issues, turning certain attitudes into the butts of jokes—eviscerating them, in effect. There's a word for this, and it's satire.

So when Borat says that Jews have horns, essentially he is skewering not anti-Semites, even, but the very notion of anti-Semitism. He is making anti-Semitism ridiculous. He's not making an argument, not making a clear claim, but rather drawing a cartoon character of an anti-Semite, a silly caricature, and the importance of that, while easily missed, is not be underestimated.

I've always defended Sarah Silverman from charges of racism, and one key example, from Jesus Is Magic, is when she's talking about how she was once accused of racism against Chinese people, and she says, "There are only two Asian people that I know that I have any problem with at all. One is, uh, [the person who accused her of racism]. The other is my friend Steve who actually went pee-pee in my Coke. He's all, 'Me Chinese, me play joke!'" As I like to point out, this is not a joke an actual racist would make: this is a joke a preschooler would make. If you're have racist feelings about Chinese people, one thing you probably do not believe is that Chinese people have a tendency to urinate in people's soft drinks. The main thing Silverman is doing here is making racism look ridiculous. Some shock-comedians' racist humor is supposed to generate an "Oh, shit, I can't believe he had the balls to say that" reaction; hers demands something much more like an "Oh, shit, can you imagine if somebody actually said that?" reaction. That is a key and important difference: Sarah Silverman is playing a character and you are supposed to laugh at her. Is there some risk that she'll be misunderstood and that it will feed actual racism? Well, I'm not Chinese myself, so it's somewhat presumptuous for me to comment, but I'm going to go ahead and say that if anyone is stupid enough to be like, "Yeah, fuckin' Chinese people are always goin' pee-pee in people's Cokes," then God bless him: go forth, young racist! (Don't worry, he won't get very far.)

Now, I'm not gay, either, and I can't say how I'd feel about Brüno if I were. But I can say this:

First, I was not excited about this movie and expecting it not to be so great—and that actually may serve to qualify the following—but I ended up thinking it was pretty consistently hilarious.

Second, and more relevantly, I was concerned that people might be right and that it might actually be accidentally a little homophobic, effectively (after all, Borat was making fun of anti-Semites by pretending to be an anti-Semite, whereas Brüno is making fun of homophobia by pretending to be gay, an important distinction), and I ended up feeling that that concern was totally unfounded.

Why?

Because I think that the main thing Brüno does is not actually to reveal anything about homophobia, but (as the great David Edelstein points out, as well) rather to make homophobes incredibly uncomfortable. I don't want to give anything away, but there's an extended scene in which something flops and swings and helicopters around (can you guess?), and the thought of homophobic dudes watching that in the theater just warmed my heart. Ultimately I think Brüno is actually more effective, satirically, than Borat—and probably does more for gay rights than Borat did for the Jews. The concern is that homophobes will watch Brüno and will laugh at the "faggot," that SBC will reinforce stereotypes, just as the concern was that anti-Semites would watch Borat and love the anti-Semitism. But just as Coke-tampering is not an actual anti-Chinese stereotype, anti-Semites don't really think Jews transform into cockroaches—and homophobes will take no pleasure in Brüno; nor will they gain any ammunition. I imagine an unprepared homophobe walking out of that film shaken and stunned. Because while Brüno does not explicitly promote any deeper understanding of actual gay people's actual humanity, it also gives the bigot no foothold, nothing to hold onto: the fear on our part is that this is giving the bigot just what he wants, but I came away feeling quite confident (based in part on some audience members' reaction) that this is not what he wants at all.

At first I was a little disappointed that Ron Paul (yes, folks, he really is horrible) and the truly monstrous "God Hates Fags" shit-heads§ don't get a more explicit and obvious comeuppance, but ultimately I decided that the point wasn't to discredit these people or even to confront them so much as to make them irrelevant.

I look forward to a day that a homophobe just won't be able to gain any traction: he'll say something about fags, and he will look like an idiot, and he will know he looks like an idiot. I don't think these folks are ever going to embrace gay marriage, but they might well learn to shut the fuck up about it. And I think that Brüno, for all its ridiculousness, may actually (in a less-direct way than you might guess, but with aim that's true all the same) bring us closer to that bright, shining, and extraordinarily gay day.

SBC in "real life"

* I loved Wayne's World and Austin Powers—don't get me wrong. But SBC's better: not necessarily funnier, but of a much higher quality. Austin Powers is funny comedy; Da Ali G Show is brilliant art.

† I wrote them a nice note about this about a year later when they wrote me asking for money. It read, and I quote, "I saw your letter to Sacha Baron Cohen of Da Ali G Show. It was one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. You have become a parody of yourselves, and your work is counterproductive. Why don't you tribalist morons go fuck yourselves? Best regards, a concerned Jewish friend." I also came up with a new motto for them: "The Anti-Defamation League: attacking religious Jews for their anti-anti-Semitic satire." And I wrote a joke: "How many Jews does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Two: one to turn the bulb and one to compare this joke to Krystallnacht."

‡ With the possible exception of politicians—see that preposterous niggardly fiasco in DC some years back.

§ This is the only context in which I'm tempted to use cocksuckers as an insult. The openly gay Perez Hilton said that that was why he called the straight will.i.am a faggot: not because he believed the word was insulting per se, because he believed that it would be insulting to will.i.am. This brings us back to (or near) irony and is a complicated thing, but let me just say: (a) I do get a kind of sadistic pleasure from imagining calling a homophobe a fag, and (b) note though that I chose to stick all this in a footnote and go with shit-heads after all. (Which is offensive to people with shit-heads.) But you know what I just remembered? SBC pulls this off perfectly, impeccably, brilliantly, unimpeachably when [SPOILER ALERT] he tells that gay-converter idiot that he (the converter) has perfect blowjob lips. Now that was a beautiful moment.