Madonna is famous for, among other things, reinventing herself. “Reinventing” is show business talk for falling to a new level of depravity. You never see the Hollywood press praising someone for finding faith or cleaning up their act but if they demean Christian values or morality, they get raves. So I was interested to see if this was some sort of political or religious statement or just the latest fashion craze.

So I watched the performance for a few moments. The woman who was the focus to the number then moved to a piano inside a glass case which later ignited in flames. I started to suspect that this wasn’t Madonna because to the best of my knowledge she doesn’t play the piano and is old enough to remember that the late Michael Jackson set himself on fire awhile back. At the end of the song the woman leaned back with outstretched arms as if to say I have exhausted myself as an artist by dancing and lip syncing for three minutes.

In a few seconds I found this was indeed not Madonna but a woman who goes by the name of Lady Gaga, a reference to a “Queen” song. I was fascinated by this performer but not for the reason you might think. As a comedian I detected a note of farce in the act. The whole thing seemed to me to have a touch of “Borat” included.

With that in mind I did a little research on Ms. Gaga. The title “Lady” is a fake! I found no record of her elevation to that rank by any royal court. Perhaps she wants us to think she is English like Madonna and Kathleen Turner who have started using British accents for no apparent reason. She did however recently meet the Queen of England and wasn’t sure whether to bow or curtsey so she did a little of both. Lady Gaga is also prone to wearing outrageous get-ups which she refers to as “fashion.” She also has a habit of referring to herself in the third person. Just when I was letting all of this pretentiousness get to me I realized I was being had. Like a mark in the middle of a con who suddenly realizes things aren’t what they seem, I caught on.

Lady Gaga, I am a fan! You see, this performance artist isn’t following in the footsteps of Madonna. She is channeling the spirit of Tony Clifton. She is having us all on, the music industry, the fashion industry and the general public. Andy Kaufman lives.

Newsweek scribe Ramin Setoodeh writes about the trend in the liberal magazine’s latest edition. Setoodeh bemoans the fact that some of the best films lately take a too sober view of society. On that we can agree.

Then, Setoodeh whips out his trusty Bush bashing cudgel and starts a whacking:

You can blame Hollywood’s doom and gloom on the Oscars, but I’m not going to. Instead, I think it’s George W. Bush’s fault. Most liberal directors felt restless under his presidency, and they pushed the envelope with over-the-top, operatic tragedies.

He then compares the recent Oscar nominees to ones during the end of President Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House – noting such gut-busters as “Shakespeare in Love” and “The Full Monty” to burnish his case.

Suffice to say Oscar voters have a plethora of comedies to choose from every year, but they simply go toward films which have that Academy vibe.

Biopics and Bush bashing documentaries usually lead the way.

But big screen comedies enjoyed  a renaissance during the Bush years, partly thanks to the Judd Apatow machine. Consider “Wedding Crashers,” “Superbad” and “Borat” as just a sampling of the side-splitting films from the last eight years.

And, in a just world, a smart, sweet and bawdy comedy like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” would have earned a Best Picture nomination. Too bad Oscar voters look down their collective noses at such material.

Comedies, we’ve learned over the years, need not apply when Oscar season begins.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine a film like “Annie Hall” would be an Oscar favorite today, even though it walked away with the 1977 Best Picture statuette.

Blaming Bush for the glut of oh-so serious movies makes little sense – unless you’re writing for a magazine eager to keep slamming the former President while apologizing for the current Commander-in-Chief.

Well, I liked it. That’s no guarantee you will.

Years ago, I did stand-up. Learned a lot doing that. One thing you learn is that there’s often a difference between the craft of comedy and what it takes to reliably get laughs. Some of the most inventive, impressive comedy minds don’t sell a lot of tickets. (I could name them. You wouldn’t know them.) But one act you can almost always count on selling tickets—putting “butts in seats,” as a venue-owner will say—is one that is big and loud and shocking. That is, there is The Fine Art of Stand-up Comedy, and then there is Getting A Reaction Out of The Audience. (That’s why many comedians curse so much. That’s why I cursed so much.) Turns out the latter is almost always going to sell tickets, and people are going to laugh for much the same reason a baby laughs when you play peek-a-boo with him. I think most people laugh at Gallagher not because he’s particularly creative in busting that watermelon with a sledgehammer, but because he had the stones to drag the thing up there the first time and smash it at all. We are surprised, and all but the most unpleasant surprise begets laughter.

So “comedy”—rather, the getting of laughs—comes in two basic approaches, wit and shock. The former takes skill; the latter takes immodesty, but both are saleable and, to the vast majority of people, entertaining. (Hence the basis for the fact that the vector of quality for entertainment points ever downward.)

Sometimes, and it’s rare, you get wit and shock together. Borat was that. The problem with the combination is that a whole lot of people are so offended by the shock that they have no interest in digging through the muck to get to the wit. They may even deny that it’s there, or claim it’s not worth getting dirty to find it. Fair enough. But Borat did find that combination at times, and many controversial performers do (and did) find it fairly often:  Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks (both dead too young, bless ‘em), Howard Stern, Penn & Teller.

Bruno, though, is almost pure shock, and for that reason it will probably make more money than Borat. Bruno is pure raunch. As I said to a friend who saw it with me (my second viewing, I must admit), “If someone handed you this R-rated movie and asked you to make it NC-17, what could you possibly put in it to make it so?” I was stumped. So was he. Yet, as I said, shock is a pretty effective kind of entertainment. Bruno works if you don’t believe in the possibility of moral decline from an hour-and-a-half of immoral repose. I laughed. A whole lot. Sue me.

So what’s in the movie? Well, it’s mostly “gay fashionista” Bruno doing, describing, pantomiming, praising, parsing, and peeling back homo – and hetero-sexual, umm, acts, to the outrage of immediate onlookers, for the better (or worse) part of an hour and a half. It is explicit and vulgar and unflinching. Because of that, it is also riotously funny. It is tighter (sorry) than Borat; no scene simply marks time or advances the (almost non-existent) plot without incident. Unlike Borat, it tiptoes up to some of the sacred cows of the left, though it comes nowhere near tipping them over. It takes the easy shots at Alabama rednecks. (Memo to Sacha Baron Cohen: there are rural areas and rednecks outside every major city—New York, Washington, Chicago. Go there next time and expose the un-popped prejudices of some of your smug coastal fans.) It zaps stage parents. It digs at people too nice to dig back.

What it doesn’t do is preach about gay rights. I think the whole social consciousness shtick attached to this picture is nothing more than preventive marketing. Sacha Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles don’t have any political agenda that I can find, and I’ve dug through this thing twice (the second time to hear the jokes I laughed over the first time). They just want to get laughs. By any means necessary.

Mission accomplished.

Oh, big city critics loved them some “Borat,” which spent 95% if its screen time manipulating, editing and boiling down average, working class, not-bothering-anyone Americans (and Romanian peasants) into the worst possible caricature imaginable. How they laughed and found genius and insight into the machinated savaging of everyday folks just minding their own business. But listen to some of them squeal and squawk now that the satire is turned on someone other than us. Here’s a sampling:

San Francisco Chronicle: 

Imagine if a white comedian went into the Deep South, disguised in a very convincing blackface and started acting like Stepin Fetchit.

Hollywood Reporter:  

Consequently, the character’s gayness reads false. Baron Cohen needs to spend more time in certain gay bars if he wants to learn how to do “flamboyant” and “fabulous.” It’s a ghost of the real thing.

The New Yorker: 

You can’t honestly defend your principled lampooning of homophobia when nine out of every ten images that you project onscreen comply with the most threadbare cartoons of gay behavior.

New York Post:

Not to get all PC on you, but the straight, outrageously dressed Baron Cohen camps it up in what has legitimately been criticized as swishy gay equivalent of blackface.

So here’s the lesson: Preying on unsuspecting everyday people, misleading them, manipulating them, pushing them until you get the reaction you desire and then editing them into something even worse, is a-okay. But… An obvious, over-the-top satire of gay men crosses the line.

As I said in my review, the only thing that mitigates the mean-spiritedness of “Bruno” is that, unlike “Borat,” everyone’s taking satiric fire. But now that the guffaws aren’t so one-sided, some aren’t guffawing so much. Worse, someone who isn’t gay lampooning flamboyantly gay men finds himself tarnished as a kind of “blackface” comedian. How interesting, when…

Everyday — on the big screen and small — we see Christians, Southerners, Republicans, Pro-lifers, Red Staters and the working class, ridiculed and savaged by actors who are none of those things. Where’s the cry of “blackface” then?

Baron Cohen is obviously a very talented actor, but there was nothing “brave,” “illuminating” or “ballsy” about “Borat.” Trashing the “great unwashed” is what’s known as a resume enhancer in Hollywood and Manhattan — about as “ballsy” as bringing beer to a frat party. ”Bruno,” on the other hand, actually is somewhat brave for risking charges of “insensitivity” (and worse) from the usual suspects.   

Maybe this is just the beginning for Baron Cohen, maybe he’s working his way towards something truly “fresh” and “brave” … something where he sends a Christian into a GLAAD meeting, a cowboy into a La Raza gathering… We’ll see what happens to a parked car with a “NObama” sticker at NYU or MSNBC, or to a screenwriter pitching a pro-Bush script at a Hollywood studio… Better yet, a Berkeley student with a Palin t-shirt, or a white South African running for elected office in a Democrat primary as an “African-American.”

Now that truly would be an ”illuminating” look at American prejudices, and one that required much less editing than “Borat” to make its subjects look bad. But maybe that’s just my prejudice talking.

That was the best year for movies that I can recall. That summer alone we had “Forrest Gump,” “True Lies,” “Speed,” and everyone was eagerly awaiting the arrival of Cannes winner “Pulp Fiction.” And we also had “The Lion King.” I remember the critic for my campus newspaper, The Red & Black (Go Dawgs!), panned the film, noting that the “Circle of Life” song, sung by a gay man, was really about keeping groups of people, particularly minorities, in their place. I thought this was bizarre and brought it up with some of my classmates.

I was a drama major. Hellooooo! What was I thinking!

Turns out the movie was homophobic and racist. Scar, the villain, was clearly gay, I was told. I missed that. By missing it, i.e. not having an opinion on the sexual preference of a cartoon lion, I was also a homophobe. Huh? As for the charge of racism, the hyenas, famously voiced by Cheech Marin and Whoopi Goldberg, were stereotypes of blacks and Mexicans. But, as I pointed out, James Earl Jones, a black man, voiced the role of Mufasa. The response still floors me: Yes, but he wasn’t portrayed as a black person.

Did you catch that?

Because Mufasa’s not shucking and jiving, he’s not a black person. I can’t pretend to have called my friends on this; frankly, I was stunned. The PC mindset had led my friends to charge the film with racism, and in doing so they revealed themselves to be slaves to stereotypes. Racists? Probably not. But certainly not deserving of their pious attitude toward Uncle Walt and Company.

Which brings me back to “Borat.” I happen to agree with Christopher Hitchens, who notes that the film makes Americans look more tolerant than the left seems to believe. The sequence in a “black” Atlanta neighborhood doesn’t work as humor if the viewer doesn’t have some pre-conceived notions about black street culture. The elitists were falling all over themselves to point out the rodeo audience cheering Borat’s pro-Bush, pro-War on Terror speech–guess they didn’t notice the woman rolling her eyes. I bet there were more reactions like this…on the cutting room floor, of course.

The elitists’ favorite scene, though, was the one that made fun of them intolerant southerners. The one where Borat insulted the host, crapped in a bag, and, in a move that busted up the party, invited over a prostitute. To the elites, the fact that she was OBVIOUSLY a prostitute had NOTHING to do with her presence breaking up the party. You remember, she was black. And this crowd was clearly offended to be in the presence of a black woman.

I don’t think this is the case and the reaction reveals more about the elites than the scene itself reveals about the great unwashed southern masses. In the end, the Liberal elites had to interpret the movie in this way, if only to excuse themselves for embracing a movie with wall-to-wall juvenile poop and penis jokes. With “Brüno,” they’re taking the “Lion King” approach, embracing it less than they did “Borat” and pointing out the stereotypes. I can’t wait to see what it reveals about them.

The “right people,” naturally, are mostly coastal elites who loved watching the everyday folks they so loathe cynically set up and manipulated to a point where they could be edited into unappealing, buffoonish caricatures, which isn’t to say a few weren’t truly unappealing and buffoonish, or that when it wasn’t gross-out disgusting the adventures of Sacha Baron Cohen’s clueless foreigner didn’t serve up a few honestly-earned laughs. But just the thought of joining up with the superior, self-satisfied smugs imperiously chuckling from Hollywood Hills and Manhattan skyscrapers as their personal jester demeaned we peasants cast a mean-spirit over everything.  

With “Bruno,” and to his eternal credit, the Jester has turned on his masters and as we’ve seen in all those “Does ‘Bruno’ go too far?” articles, not surprisingly, many of them find turnabout unfair play. Because it’s now celebrity culture and other protected classes (gays and blacks) also facing Baron Cohen’s withering fire, suddenly what was once so daring, illuminating, brave and hilarious – guffaws at the expense of others – must now be met with beard scratching over “false gayness” and heavy, solemn pauses due to a “nasty streak.”

If you define politically incorrect as I do – having the guts to satirize the Left’s sacred cows (or everything Stewart, Letterman and Maher don’t do) - ”Bruno” hits the mark with an across the board ambush which, because everyone’s taking fire, goes a long way to mitigate the mean-spiritedness that made “Borat” such an exercise in elitist cruelty. The downside, and it’s a steep one, is that “Bruno” is relentlessly smutty and lewd, packed with full-frontal male nudity (much of it in close-up), outrageous but explicit portrayals of gay sex, and most disturbing, a swingers’ orgy with only the smallest of black dots to avoid an X-rating. This is easily the most off-putting film in years.  

A series of increasingly disturbing, ambush-style set pieces designed for uncomfortable laughter revolve around the thin plot of a flamboyantly gay Austrian television host who, with his faithful gay assistant Luntz, comes to America seeking fame, celebrity and to be the biggest “gay star since Arnold Schwarzenegger.” At first Bruno tries the conventional Hollywood route with an agent who helps to set up a pilot for a celebrity interview show. After this crashes and burns, Bruno starts to re-think the whole “gay” thing and hopes success can be found if he “man’s up” with, among other things, a stint in the National Guard, self-defense courses and a sexual re-orientation ministry.

There are some truly funny moments, dozens of them, in fact, and many of the situations are even inspired. Watching Bruno destroy a fashion show, take the adopted black baby he named O.J. on a Jerry Springer-ish talk show, get permission from degenerate stage mothers to put their young children in danger and criticize Osama bin Laden’s sense of fashion to one of his underlings, is to bear witness to moments of real comic genius. But for every one of these there are at least five seedy others that make you want to take a shower and go to confession.

There’s another comedy line breached that has nothing to do with the explicit content. Frequently the narrative gets lazy and asks us to consciously laugh only at the idea we’re being shocked – only at the idea of how explicit and revolting things get. You can almost hear the filmmakers bragging like children, “Can you believe we got an R-rating?”  

No. I can’t.

Over time the relentless nudity and crudity starts to wear. Even though you’re laughing, at the same time you’re hoping the next scene gives it a rest. But as the film rolls on things only get worse until – even though you’re still laughing – you can’t wait for it to come to an end.

As far as all the talk about whether or not “Bruno’s” homophobic , the answer is absolutely not. Unlike Baron Cohen’s victims, those everyday people who mind their own business, the Bruno character is fictional and obviously satiric. The only possible “homophobic” moment comes from former presidential candidate Ron Paul who calls Bruno a “queer” after the Austrian Fashionista makes a crude pass at him. Personally, I think GLAAD should award Paul a medal for tolerance. Gay or straight, Bruno deserved to get knocked on his ass.

I think it was Andy Warhol who said that after ten minutes of watching porn he wanted to have sex with everyone, but after an hour he never wanted to have sex again. That pretty well sums up sitting through “Bruno.”

The second was the release of Keira Knightley’s new ad about domestic violence.

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Now these two videos have very little in common.  Cohen’s trailer is an outrageous piece of shock theater.  Knightley’s ad is a public service message designed to raise awareness of domestic abuse. 

But what both have in common is a willingness to cross all lines of good taste and judgment. 

It’s unfashionable these days to question artists’ taste.  The phrases “good taste” and “bad taste” seem to be out of style – we’re no longer allowed to ask whether pushing the envelope is morally questionable, or whether art can better flourish within particular limits.  We’re all supposed to buy into the idea that there’s a constitutional right to broadcast shows like Real Sex on HBO (there isn’t – the founders would have thrown the creators and purveyors in prison), and that censorship of such material is far worse than public airing of such material (it isn’t – did the country really suffer when hard core pornography had to be bought on the black market?).  We’re never supposed to question whether limits – even voluntary limits — ought to be placed on raunchy or sadistic material, particularly when such material is the subject of comedy or announcements of societal import.  

Watch the two videos.  Then tell me whether the public wouldn’t better be served by artists using some discretion. 

Let’s start with the Cohen video.  There’s no question this is incredibly disgusting material.  Some of it is hilarious, no question.  But it’s not exactly good taste to show a naked busty dominatrix whipping a faux gay fashion designer. 

Now there are those in the comic community who think that shock value is a good substitute for actual humor.  In fact, there are those who think that all of the best humor has to be shocking by definition.  Perhaps I’m more old-fashioned in my definition of comedy, but I believe that some of the best comedy doesn’t break boundaries – wittiness can be as funny as a fat hairy naked guy running around a hotel.  And not only that — comedy can question beliefs and parody points of view without forcing the viewer to retch.  Classic screwball comedies are still funny today.  And Lenny Bruce and George Carlin aren’t the beginning and end of all comedy. 

Then there are the “public service announcements.”  Try these on for size:

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If these don’t gross you out, you’ve been watching far too much Dexter.  Businesses focus on workplace safety because they’re afraid of being sued, not because they watch ads that feature dudes with poles sticking out of their chests.  Men who beat women aren’t going to stop beating women because they see Keira Knightley getting kicked in the stomach – in all likelihood, they’ll beat women more, fantasizing about Keira Knightley.  Pushing positive messages isn’t any more of a justification for showing unbelievably graphic material than doing comedy. 

If this makes me too Puritan, then I guess I’m too Puritan.  I’m not saying that Sacha Baron Cohen isn’t funny.  He’s hilarious.  Borat was hysterical when it wasn’t grotesque.  But I don’t think the question “is this good for our society?” ought to be completely ignored just because someone utters the word “art.”  I don’t think shock value is the only value.  Sometimes shock value is worthwhile (The Last King of Scotland) and/or funny (Tootsie).  But not all the time.  And I fear that when we lose sight of the fact that there are values other than shock value to be considered, we surrender to the basest instincts in both art and politics.