Bruno strikes again

July 6, 2008 - 3:16 PM by Harry · 3 Comments
Filed under: Pop Culture

Bruno, yet another alter ego of Sacha Baron Cohen Sasha Baron Cohen has been making a living by messing with people for ten years now. Ever since the first appearance of Ali G on England’s Channel 4 in 1998, he’s been refining his art of taking on provocative personae and interacting with real people. The results end up revealing quite a bit about his interviewees: their true beliefs and the limits of their capacity for tolerance of “the other.”

While many of us have been tracking Cohen’s exploits for close to ten years, the global mainstream media and its consumers were largely oblivious to the phenomenon until the release of the Borat movie (subtitled Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) in 2006. The resulting exposure meant that Cohen could no longer get away with his antics in the same manner, as potential targets began to know what they were getting into, so he announced a few months ago that his primary personae, Kazakh journalist Borat and Cockney-Ebonics poser Ali G, would be retired.

In the meantime, development and production for the Bruno movie has begun in earnest. A flamboyantly gay Austrian MTV-style talking head, Bruno has was sighted a few months ago in a Wichita airport, dancing provocatively with a balloon salesman.

Cohen, meanwhile, has been to Israel many times. Having grown up a Jewish preppie in London, he even volunteered on a kibbutz for a year with Labor Zionism’s international Habonim-Dror youth group. And despite Borat’s headline-making staunch anti-Semitism, the blockbuster Cohen persona promoted his movie extensively here, even giving interviews in Hebrew – I mean Kazakh.

But now Bruno has been sighted in Israel for the first time, having duped a peace-making duo self-branded as Bitter Lemons into actually explaining why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is slightly more important than the Jennifer-Angelina one, explaining to him the difference between hummus and Hamas and so forth.

This according to a memoir, written by Bruno’s victims for The Forward. The Israel-oriented media world is, of course, lapping it up. Some have wondered if Bruno came to Jerusalem to participate in the city’s recent gay pride parade. Others have focused on putting the incident into the context of Cohen’s long, storied career of putting stuffy diplomats in their places. And still more have pointed out that the Bitter Lemons guys need to perhaps down-play their own supposedly tongue-in-cheek bitterness if they want to be seen in the movie as anything but partners in suckerhood – the ultimate Middle Eastern taboo.

Cohen “is exploiting our tragic and painful conflict in the most cynical and deceptive manner,” laments peace-nik Yossi Alpher in his Forward column. “I doubt he’ll give us anything in return,” Well how about giving us an excuse to unpuff our shirts? As Robert Plant once yelped, “Does anyone remember laughter?”

Until the Bruno movie hits theaters in about a year, though, all we have to deal with is a big buzz over a production spoiler – a mere footnote in the annals of Zionism that has captivated pop culture fans and detractors alike.

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