Medieval manuscript artists frequently indulged in irreverent, bawdy, shocking humor...
Posted on 07/24/2009 4:53:18 AM PDT by Kaslin
When it comes to awful movies, Pat Buchanan once quipped he didn't have to look underneath a manhole cover to know there's a sewer down below. The smutty new movie "Bruno" can be read by its cover. In the midst of a barrage of crude sexual humor, master satirist Sacha Baron Cohen is once again exposing Americans for what Time magazine calls their "ignorance and prejudice, hypocrisy and primitive rage."
Yes, I'm sure it has its funny moments, and some are laugh-out-loud hilarious. I say I'm sure because I really don't know. I was on my way to the theater when I reversed course. I'm not going to give these slimy people $9.50, or $1.50. Besides, it's all there on the Internet.
In his last film, "Borat," Cohen played an idiotic journalist from Kazakhstan who attempted to expose unsuspecting people as misogynistic, racist and anti-Semitic. The new title character of "Bruno" is a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion reporter who is going to expose the raging "homophobia" in America, especially the South (also targeted in the last film).
But this character is so unbelievably stupid and self-absorbed that the film seems to set the cause of sexual "liberation" backward by a decade or two.
The shock and disgust arrives early, when Bruno has a tiny Asian lover who helps him pour champagne. It's not hard to imagine where Cohen places the champagne bottle as he pours the little man like a teapot.
Bruno decides to come to America and make a pilot of a new celebrity-interview show. But since Bruno is an idiot and can't land a celebrity interview, we're left with a scene where a focus group watches as Cohen's pilot displays a long, drawn-out shot of a penis twirling around like a pinwheel, which then points at the camera and "speaks."
The focus group speaks for almost everyone when they suggest they'd rather pluck their eyes out than watch any more of this garbage.
"Bruno" originally drew an NC-17 rating, but the viewer is left wondering if putting a tiny black box over sex acts, real or simulated (like group sex at a swingers club) is all Cohen needed to get an R rating. This film's full-frontal nudity and gross-out clips are more than a permissive parent bringing a teenager will expect.
It's not a huge hit with audiences -- it "flamed out in its second weekend," the website Box Office Mojo reported, without a wink. But it will make enough profit in theatres and on DVD to offer Cohen another opportunity to abuse unsuspecting Americans with his film droppings.
And maybe that's what's more upsetting than the smuttiness. It is the systematic dishonesty. Cohen's filmmaking strategy is to lie relentlessly to the real people he interacts with on film.
Take Alabama pastor Jody Trautwein, who earnestly tries in the film to convert Bruno to leave his homosexual lifestyle in favor of Christianity. As the pastor talks of following Jesus, Cohen has his idiot character talk dirty, asking if the pastor had ever put woodwind instruments "up your Auschwitz"? (Cohen, who is Jewish, uses the name of the concentration camp as a synonym for anus in the film.)
Now, here's how Trautwein explains how he was approached about the scene. On Jan. 30, 2009, he received a phone call from a Todd Lewis of Amesbury Chase productions in Los Angeles (a fake firm, complete with phony website). He told him that German One Television (also fake) had hired them to produce a documentary. He said that with the recent rise in Europe of liberalism and increasing immorality in America, German One really wanted to show strong, pure American traditional moral values.
"One of the ways they wanted to do this was they had a young man who was desiring to come out of homosexuality and wanted to give his heart to Christ," Trautwein explained. "He asked me if I would be interested in having them produce this documentary [meant to] alert parents and leaders of young people, and expose the deception and perversion that some in the entertainment industry want to perpetrate against our children, our families and our homes."
Trautwein sat with Cohen's character for two entire hours, absorbing Cohen's abuse. The pastor said director Larry Charles (who only used his first name) praised him when the abuse was over. "He said he didn't think he could have been that patient with Bruno."
So a good pastor is set up and ridiculed because, well, because he's a good man, and nothing else. That's humor?
Shock comedy is as old as comedy.
That he wins peoples trust to get them to play along with his skits and then uses that to ridicule and condemn them (just like the jackass producers did in “Jesus Camp”) is merely typical of how leftists use deceit to further their agenda, and then try to spin that betrayal by calling it satire.
The sooner someone beats the snot out of Cohen, the better. Let's hope its a Jewish lesbian woman who has enough spine and intelligence to see that this sort of slimy exploitation is intended to make one leftist egotist rich and famous at the expense of driving people apart and causing hostility among them.
“Tell you what! We’ll EAT your mum. Then, if you feel guilty about it later, we’ll dig a grave and you can throw up in it!”
from “The UNdertaker Sketch”, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, circa 1970.
Into the dustbin of history, Cohen, you bore us.
In my literary studies I haven't found any “shock humor.”
As extreme as humor gets in any of the classics that come down to us (which is just about all the writings that exist), is bawdiness, as in some of the comedies of Shakespeare. But the difference there is that the bawdiness itself did not shock the crowd because it was not beyond the mores of society the humor was being presented to.
As far as I can tell, “shock humor” is a fairly recent phenomenon and is directly tied to the counter-culture “revolution” of the 1960’s radicals.
You want me refer to objectionable material being used in a comedic situation? No specifics in that bullshit either.
Re post 6. You can’t be that friggin stupid. Comedy is based on tangential ... stuff.
“No specifics in that bullshit either.”
Brilliant.
Thanks for the enlightening exchange.
If there was in fact “shock humor” going back several thousand years (our literary heritage), you’ve provided the perfect example of why there is no record of it.
We’ll let all those that read our brief exchange decide who is being “stupid.”
What mental ‘sea change’ has occurred?
Comedy has always been crude. It inherent.
You are wrong.
Comedy, until recently, has been intellectually based. As we are told of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy (we don’t know directly because the text is lost), our heritage is that comedy is a higher art and ranks with tragedy because it looks at the human situation and then presents it in such a way that we all laugh (rather than cry) at our common situation. Comedy was an escape from the drudgery of reality while tragedy wallowed in it.
More recently, due to poor education and dying creativity among those who seek to entertain us, comedy has degraded further and further away from being intellectually based and discussing the more universal issues of the human situation to being about nothing more than the foul and filthy and, as I said, since the 60’s assaulting and insulting our established culture (in order to tear it down so that it could be replaced with a Marxist worldview).
My first post to you was simply a request to cite some examples of what we consider “shock humor” in ancient comedy, since you said shock humor is as old as comedy itself.
I disagreed and you insulted me crassly. So I think at this point we’re pretty much finished with this discussion.
I saw it as well.
Terrible and should have had a NC-17 rating.
Sasha isn’t worthy to lick the boots of the Monty Python folks.
I disagree. I’m a history buff.
You get three dots ...
A friend of mine played Borat on DVD for me a few weeks ago. Probably the most painfully unfunny movie I ever saw. No thank you, Bruno. I won’t waste my time or money on you.
From the trailer, Borat looked to be one of the funniest films ever. It looked like a brilliant mockumentary full of very funny moments.
The actual movie ... not so much.
Using shock for the sake of shock and relentlessly low brow and swimming in the gutter, Borat was about as funny as Schindler’s List.
I loved Borat. Bruno had some funny moments, but it is gross in the extreme. And rather than proving America’s supposed “homophobia,” it does the opposite. The Americans depicted are way too patient with and tolerant of Bruno’s antics.
Very well stated.
If somebody curb stomped this idiot and kicked his a$$ up and down main street I’d pay to see that
Isn’t the character gay.....98% are sickened by that behavior, even if it is “comedy”.
I went and seen Borat in the theater - there were moments I laughed so hard I had tears coming from my eyes, and times I felt so disgusted I wanted to walk out. Overall, it was a funny movie.
Bruno I wouldn’t go see if someone forced me to go at gunpoint.
Now it seems with "Bruno", Cohen made the same film. Hey, he thought to himself, I'll go to the American south again and expose homophobia for all to see. But even some homosexual movie reviewers are panning the film. Hey Cohen, try something different next time. I've got an idea, why not pose as a conservative and go around lib communities and expose them for the bigoted clods most of the are?
Somebody in New York did exactly that a few years ago.
Your studying about something I lived through.
I think I have the edge here.
Please educate me. No sarcasm.
That he wins peoples trust to get them to play along with his skits and then uses that to ridicule and condemn them (just like the jackass producers did in "Jesus Camp") is merely typical of how leftists use deceit to further their agenda, and then try to spin that betrayal by calling it satire.
I had posted on Debbie Schussel's website some time ago a somewhat severe analysis of this man Cohen. Someone replied that "Borat is a genius and you are an idiot". I laughed and put it aside. I said that there is an inner cruelty in some persons. They can use "acceptable avenues" of using humiliating and degrading approaches. This is the mark of a sociopath.
I went on to say that if the likes of Cohen, was in a concentration camp, he would survive as a "Sonder Commando". The pathetically poor gypsy people of Glod, Romania, were chosen by Cohen to spoof Kazakhstan. I read he would have been at risk in that actual country, so he picked on these desperately poor people. They got $4 per day. I understand that the depths of depravity were attributed to these unsuspecting people.
I know of his particular native country. Years aqo, when there, I found that the "joker" who got away with "murder" because the "victim" had to laugh it off, often had a characteristic. If someone ever pulled off the same thing on THEM, they had to watch out for a physical assault. I hope I will be excused for this long screed.
I feel better already (laughs).
And that includes the Contractual Obligation album.
I agree.
I was merely providing an example of early 70s “shock humor”.
Friom what I have heard, the very line I quoted from memory (I hope at least with SOME degree of accuracy) almost got the Pythons kicked off the air in the UK.
I agree.
I was merely providing an example of early 70s “shock humor”.
From what I have heard, the very line I quoted from memory (I hope at least with SOME degree of accuracy) almost got the Pythons kicked off the air in the UK.
Not sure how I managed to double post that.
Sorry.
*****************
Exactly right. Well said.
A little late in an extra post here. I chanced my arm on my previous post, but have the perfect riposte for a flaming. (I think). I get a certain unkind pleasure over relating what was referred to in regard to your post.
An ordinary citizen was entering a bar in New York. Cohen (as Borat) came up to him and fingered the man's jacket. As he ran his hands through the material, "Borat" said- "I like to feel this cloth, but I would like to feel what's in it more!"
The man started in real manly fashion, just his fists. A well known actor ran out of the bar and saved "Borat". No charges were laid.
I put myself in the man's shoes. I don't know about him, but I would have been so shook up, it would have ruined a perfectly innocent evening.
The guy ain't funny. Ah well, back to Abbott and Costello. LOL.
Shock humor is a new creation. We can thank the rise and worship of the man/boy and his infantile brain.
You bet wrong BTW.
Do you mean “archaic”?
I’m not debasising this site. I stated a fact. You disagree.
In NYC, Cohen - in Borat character - was in the process of receiving an honestly earned butt whipping when he was rescued by his buddy Hugh Laurie (”House”). So much for us ignorant bigots down South.
You ably described this type of “humor,” which has never been funny to me. There are plenty people in the world who deserve ridicule with their often publicly outrageous lifestyles. These people are known as politicians and celebrities. What could be humorous about deceiving your average Joe Blow, preoccupied as he is with earning his day’s wages to provide for his family and grabbing his amusements where he can, is beyond me. It’s just mean-spirited. I couldn’t even enjoy Howie Mandel’s idiotic “hidden camera” exploits on Leno because of his toying with regular folks.
There’s always been high comedy, but there’s also always been fart jokes. According to the wiki article the first Greek comedy known was bawdy songs during fertility festivals. That’s shock comedy.
Medieval manuscript artists frequently indulged in irreverent, bawdy, shocking humor...
No, it wasn’t.
As I said, it was part of the mores of the culture, so it was not shock. It was simply low humor. There are “fart jokes” in the Canterbury Tales. Howard Stern talks about farting. No big deal. But when Howard Stern encourages a couple to have intercourse in the entryway to St. Paul’s cathedral, that is a type of “shock” that we do not find in ancient literature.
Setting up a fake website. Claiming t be from a phony company. Asking an earnest preacher to help someone who is in trouble...all to ridicule that preacher, is not a part of our mores. Well, it is to leftists.
But to conservatives, we need to condemn it for being the anti-Christian, leftist attack that it is.
Couldn’t agree more.
He is exploiting decent people for two reasons: 1. His own fame and fortune, 2. To ridicule conservatives and especially Americans.
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