Status Anxiety | 11 July 2009

As funny as Bruno undoubtedly is, Baron-Cohen’s film is fundamentally dishonest

One of the funniest scenes in Bruno is when Sacha Baron-Cohen, playing the gay Austrian television presenter, appears on a talk show in Texas called The Richard Bey Show. The African-American audience is none too impressed when he tells them he’s looking for a black male partner to help him raise his African baby — and is even more outraged when the baby is brought out wearing a ‘Gayby’ T-shirt. ‘He’s a real dick magnet,’ Bruno explains. The audience is then shown a picture of the child in a hot tub with four other men, two of whom are performing a sex act. ‘You’re going to burn in hell for that one,’ shouts a member of the audience.

When I watched this scene during a screening earlier this week I laughed as loudly as everyone else, but afterwards it left a sour taste in my mouth. What is its purpose, exactly, beyond making people laugh? According to Universal Pictures, the Hollywood studio behind the film, ‘Bruno uses provocative comedy to powerfully shed light on the absurdity of many kinds of intolerance and ignorance, including homophobia.’ But that’s a bit of a stretch. After all, Baron-Cohen doesn’t ‘shed light’ on the homophobia of this African-American audience so much as provoke them into a homophobic reaction — and he keeps pushing and pushing until they finally snap. In any case, it isn’t clear that objecting to a baby being present while a homosexual act is performed is ‘homophobic’. I daresay the audience would have responded similarly if it was a man and a woman having sex instead.

Once you strip away the supposedly high-minded intentions of Baron-Cohen and his collaborators, the scene in question begins to seem uncomfortably snobbish, not to say a little racist.