Word: baron
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...safe to say that after more than a decade honing his characters on television and in films, Baron Cohen is more than a comedian. He's the world's most famous performance artist, the inventor of a perfect hybrid of documentary and mockumentary, reality TV and psychodrama, Jackass and Andy Kaufman. When he gets the mixture just right, he creates situations of unbearable tension that at the same time turn out to be unbearably funny. For instance, at one point Brüno does a Madonna/Angelina, coming back from Africa with a baby. Then he appears as a guest...
...goes without saying that Stephen Colbert owes Baron Cohen a debt too large to repay, but by comparison, Colbert plays it safe. His guests always know that Colbert's right-wing blowhard character is a put-on, and they happily play along. When Brüno tries to start a cuddle party with Texas Representative Ron Paul - "Has anyone ever told you, you look like Enrique Iglesias?" - the flustered former presidential candidate is definitely not in on the joke. As Paul makes his panicky escape down a hallway, he clues in one of his aides: "This guy is a queer...
...find sources for Baron Cohen's comic method in a lot of places. He's a great fan of Peter Sellers, and one Sellers role in particular hovers over everything Baron Cohen does - Chance the Gardener, the blank slate in Being There who provokes all those around him to expose themselves in some way. And then there's the other comic who was routinely described as a performance artist: Andy Kaufman. For starters, Borat owes a thing or two to Latka, the Ruritanian innocent that Kaufman played on Taxi. More important, Baron Cohen's approach calls to mind those Kaufman...
...Kaufman reserved his passive aggression for audiences, who because they were audiences were already primed for a performance of some kind, even if they didn't always get the joke. Baron Cohen takes his act out into the wider world, all for the fun of proving what fools these mortals be. That includes the mortals called Ali G, Borat and Brüno - Baron Cohen's comic characters are as dumb and deplorable as the people they mock. Ali G is a self-deluding white guy who yearns to be a black rapper. Borat is a rube and an anti...
...could be looked at as the third in a trilogy of films that Baron Cohen has devoted to each of the three characters he developed first on British television and then on HBO. Though Ali G Indahouse was a hit in the U.K., it went straight to video in the U.S. Borat was, of course, a global cultural and box-office phenomenon, except maybe in Kazakhstan, where some people got a bit sniffy. Both characters are too famous now for Baron Cohen to use them anymore as a lure for the unsuspecting. Before the summer...