Cage fighting, cheap beer and ... Bruno!
Posted: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 6:45 AM by Kurt Schlosser
Filed Under:
Movies, Pop culture
By now, in our hyper-immediate, straight-to-the-Web culture of infotainment, I guess I would have expected most people to be familiar with Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Borat, aka Ali G, aka Bruno. Thankfully, for the sake of comedy, many people are not familiar with him.
Cohen isn't just a prankster running around on some obscure corner of cable television. The British comic made his mark on HBO with "Da Ali G Show" and introduced viewers to the characters mentioned above. Borat, the fictional journalist from Kazakhstan, rose to big-screen fame in 2006 with "Borat: Cultural Leanings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." The film won two Golden Globe awards and was nominated for an adapted screenplay Oscar. Borat/Cohen was everywhere after seemingly rising to fame based on the premise that he was nowhere -- at least nowhere anyone had seen him in the United States, which made his brand of comedy possible.
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And now Cohen is back at it, but not with the over-exposed Borat. He's back with Bruno, the fictional homosexual Austrian fashion TV reporter who no one knows. Yet.
Cohen is in the midst of bringing Bruno to the big screen and this week brings news of a spectacular stunt in the great state of Arkansas. (By the way, the rumored movie title? "Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt"). You can learn all you need to know about how things went down in Texarkana and Fort Smith over at The Smoking Gun. In short, Cohen lured specators to what they thought was a night of cage fighting, $1 beer and "hot chicks," according to an event poster. What they got was angry, at the sight of two men undressing and kissing in the ring -- and at being duped.
It's classic Cohen guerilla comedy tactics designed to turn unsuspecting Americans into extras in his latest project. I was convinced that after Borat became such a big film success, Cohen would have to change course completely. Apparently not. It's a big country out there, and if you like to laugh, that's a good thing.
