by Rachel Chang
In the three years that I spent amongst the future cognoscenti of the UK, it was considered gauche to not know and love Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy. His refusal to break character thrilled a post-ironic generation so knowing that knowingness had become passe. For a truly post-modern comedian like Cohen, genius – and success – lay in the exploitation of a political incorrectness that mocks – nay, transcends – good taste. The pretensions of Cohen’s characters – or lack thereof, in the case of his mega-hit Borat – were open wounds daring the audience to look away first. And after years of being smothered by propriety, the world gaped like a pubescent boy at a porn site.
Borat, the character that really propelled Cohen to superstardom, was premised on just these themes. Cohen was held up as some sort of folk hero, whose clueless Eastern European immigrant-ness was used as a foil to expose and indict the racism and sheer stupidity of middle America. But the movie’s popularity stemmed from more than the world being shocked at its own small-heartedness (if so, all the hard-hitting documentaries exposing everything from fast food conglomerates to political corruption would all gross over $200 million too.) Borat’s secret weapon was not so much to shock and awe as it was to relate to his audience’s sensibilities. At a time when Europe and America are experiencing an influx of immigrants from precisely that part of the world, all gurgled syllables and polyester trousers; for a generation that laughs at the Soviet Union’s propaganda posters rather than fears its gulags, Borat was these little discomforts writ large. And to laugh at him – and surely it was “at”, not “with” – was to allow all those demons out. It was to unleash, if just for a few hours, our collective upturned lip at a pitiful foreigner slavering to be let onto the gold-lined pavements of our great democracies. And this was precisely Cohen’s genius: he created a character that epitomised, like the slit-eyed, pig-tailed chinky cartoons in early 20th century America, what we hated about these outsiders (precisely, their “foreignness”), while allowing us to believe that we were actually on their sides. He balanced exactly the battling impulses of our irrational distastes and our theoretical social norms – and made it a romping good time at the cinema to boot.
This is why I think that Bruno, Cohen’s latest character, is a pale follow-up effort. It will surely be successful – Cohen’s fame and the gigantic studio promotional effort behind it probably ensures that – but I doubt it will succeed in breaking the kind of ground Borat did. And we can chalk that up to Cohen’s usually razor-sharp comic instinct going slight awry. It’s hard to blame him. When one’s craft exists in the tiny sliver that I’ve described, it’s not easy to be on mark every time. But I think that in choosing this theme – the faggotty, outrageous and therefore “fabulous” gay man – as a follow-up to the clueless, dirty immigrant, he is one step, perhaps two, behind the zeitgeist. A sad state of affairs, for a comedian used to leading it.
The thing is, the “faggot” – a term I will use as shorthand for that mesh-shirt wearing, limp-wristed gay man (apologies to anyone who takes it as a slur term) – is a stale cultural caricature. Cohen takes it to an extreme, as he did Borat. The way Borat shits into a plastic bag (mocking the cultural “foreignness” and lack of personal hygiene of those in the Third World) is analogous to the way Bruno wears an assortment of truly ridiculous get-ups (his worldwide movie premiere outfits were a promotional junket on their own: leotard lederhosen in Pars, skintight bull catsuit in Madrid). The idea is that no real human being would actually behave this way – no actual immigrant would shit in a bag; no actual gay man would carry on as such. This is crucial because it distances the laughing audience from the prejudice from which their mirth stems.
But the world, and the entertainment industry, has evolved more quickly than Cohen seems aware. Is Bruno really that mind-blowing when there are characters like Bobby Trendy and Jordan, walking famewhores and self-caricatures? Is Bruno really that distanced from reality when annual gay pride parades brandish get-ups as show-stopping if not more? The “faggot” has become a stale caricature in comedy simply because it has become an entrenched part of mainstream society. For Cohen’s comedy, which is premised on awkwardness, a central character that isn’t particularly remarkable in today’s world is neither particularly good comic fodder.
In fact, the roots of our identification with the flamboyant gay character is the evolution of social moral systems to an acceptance (not everywhere, of course, but in the intellectual circles that dominate the discourse) of the character. Homophobia is no longer acceptable nor, in fact, reasonable. This is unlike the still unanswered question of whether immigration and cultural mingling is a political and normative good. And while immigrants adapt to new cultures, so whittling away the foreignness that plagues all newcomers, gay men are just emerging from a long battle to renounce the evils of assimilation, and live as they so desire. ”Foreign” and “native” will always be diametrically opposed categories, fulfilling a descriptive function even if they are one day stripped of their emotional implications. But the story of the last few decades have been the wrenching of dichotomy from “gay” and “straight”. Boy, Man, Woman, Person: these are no longer positioned in opposition to Homosexual.
This is not just to say that Bruno is more offensive than Borat. I don’t believe for a minute that Cohen means to be homophobic with this character (although some have charged this). I do think that he has miscalculated where society stands in relation to its gay members, and to crude stereotypes of said members. The symbolic violence of homosexual representations in the cultural discourse is no longer a silent perpetuation of prejudice. Over the last few decades, this bigotry has been forced out into the open and confronted (if the battle is still not won.) And so the days when a straight man playing gay would be funny are behind us – both because gay men are now rightfully part of mainstream culture, and because the prejudice no longer resonates with a mainstream audience. And ultimately, the failure to recognise this is on Cohen. Because a comedian a step slower than the world he mocks is no comedian at all.
