Sacha Baron Cohen as Bruno.
(2 of 3)
Some parts of Brüno--the weakest ones--are closer to conventional scripted comedy than anything in Borat. A montage of scenes of sexual gymnastics involving Brüno and a pint-size Asian boyfriend could have come from a Will Ferrell movie, assuming Ferrell was willing to have himself penetrated by a mechanical dildo. (And don't bet he wouldn't be.) But Brüno's encounters with real people are priceless, even when the real people are celebrities. When the L.A. house he is renting as a location for a new interview show turns out to be unfurnished, Brüno recruits some Mexican laborers to get down on all fours as human benches. What kind of person would actually sit on other people? Now we know: Paula Abdul, warily, and LaToya Jackson, with gusto. Jackson's scene was cut from the film after Michael's death, so unless it's restored on the DVD, you won't get to see that what really offends her about the situation is not the humiliation of the workers but Brüno's persistent attempts to get her brother's phone number.
It 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!"
You can 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 routines--though routine is the wrong word for anything he did--in which he deliberately set out to bore and bewilder his audiences, just to see what would happen. In one he went onstage and simply read aloud from The Great Gatsby. While everyone waited for the joke, the punch line, the something, the anything, he just kept reading.