If somebody shot a home movie of myself walking down a Sofia main street completely naked, effecting a deliberately effeminate walk, I’d be sure to attract some strange looks from passers-by. If I decided to deliberately seek out some extreme homophobes from Ataka or Boyan Rasate’s bovver-boys, I may even attract violence.

To the viewer, nestling comfortably in his armchair, all these scenes would be uproariously funny. Anything that so breaches convention elicits fascination but also a grudging admiration for the courage of the perpetrator. But does that make it clever?

Sacha Baron Cohen is an extremely talented man, so his characters transcend straightforward exhibitionism. But they’re still a throwback to the past, an updated version of the kind of characters that British comedians like Dick Emery and Harry Enfield invented.

His Ali G was a superb comic creation. The character revealed what many of us who lived in British inner cities knew for a long time, that for white dispossessed inner city kids, ‘black’ was cool.

Unfortunately, not the black of the burgeoning educated middle class but instead the nihilism, anti-intellectualism and menace of the ‘gangsa’ gun-toting rappa. In rap they also found a kind of anti-establishment patois they could admire. They emulated the dress and speech patterns of their black peers. You could, for example, be on a London bus and hear a group of – what you thought – were black kids talking, only to turn round and see white kids. It was hip to be black at a time when society was becoming increasingly obsessed with ‘yoof’ and street cred.

Trying to be cool
Even public figures were keen to stress their ‘cool’ credentials. Nobody wanted to be seen as stuffy. The Ali G character, the white kid dressed up as a black man, exploited that to the full.

Establishment figures were lured onto the Ali G show, and made to answer the daftest questions imaginable. Neither did they baulk when Ali bragged about drugs or made disparaging remarks about women. In effect, the character proved just how uncourageous people were.

To his credit, one of the few who did tackle Ali G’s sexist and cynical view of society and women was veteran politician Tony Benn. When Ali G mentioned that welfare was just "bitches wantin’ council flats’, Benn chastised him: "If you talk about people like that, don’t be surprised when someone comes along and shoot you." Others said nothing while he regaled them with ridiculous stories of "flyin’ to the corner shop" while on drugs.

If Ali G was a device designed to reveal how cowardly society was becoming, then it worked brilliantly. And credit must be given to Cohen’s acting skills. Relentless dumbness is difficult for an actor to convey. If there was a cause for concern, however, it was that by failing to confront the negative stereotype of black youth, some of his interviewees perpetuated it.

Annoying polite society
Borat was another brilliant comedy creation. The anti-Semitic Kazakh journalist might have riled his ‘home country’ but its purpose was never to cast commentary on Kazakhstan. Baron Cohen simply needed to find an anonymous country in the proverbial sticks. In Europe it could have been Albania or even Bulgaria (the scenes in Borat were actually filmed in a village in Romania) but in the end he counted (correctly) on few people having any knowledge of Kazakhstan.

Like Ali G, the character was outrageous and fascistic. But Borat went one stage further, believing, for example, that a pair of obviously harmless elderly Jewish householders were trying to poison him. And when the bear-baiting, Jew-hating journalist with filthy habits and incredibly off-kilter social etiquette toured America the joke certainly wasn’t on Kazakhstan.

The fake identity was just a device to reveal the insularity of people who could believe such a person existed, someone who would enter into the company of polite southern society (it always seems to be Americans in the deep south who fall victim to Baron Cohen’s characters) defecate in their house and then cheerfully bring the results back to the dinner table in a plastic bag. At that point most people would have suspected a ruse – unless that is they really believed that people from Kazakhstan behaved in such a manner.
Obviously, some people did.   

Needless to say, Borat also revealed the extent of racism, or at least widespread apathy in the face of it. When Borat wanders into a gun shop, for example, and asks, "What is best gun to defend from a Jew?" a gun shop owner doesn’t even blink before showing off a 9mm. And when Borat asks a car salesman how fast a vehicle has to go to kill a band of gypsies, the response is similar: "35 to 40 mph," the man says calmly. When, at the beginning of the movie, Borat says he wants to travel across America by car in case "the Jews repeat their attacks of 9/11", I wasn’t entirely sure that all the audience got the joke. But I like to think they did.

In your face
Bruno is now on general release. Like Ali G and Borat, the character of Bruno – the gay Austrian fashionista – is outrageous. Bruno is shown engaged in sado-masochistic activities of the kind that one hopes happen seldom, either in gay or straight ‘communities’. But, unlike the first two characters, the intentions of Baron Cohen’s Bruno character remain unclear. Baron Cohen himself has always remained resolutely elusive, only granting occasional interviews out of character.

So what reactions, other than squirming embarrassment, are supposed to be engendered? If his intention was to show that those shocked by Bruno’s antics are bigoted homophobes, then I am one too. Yet I resolutely am not. Fact is, were I to witness a heterosexual couple engaged in some of the activities depicted in this move, I would have felt uneasy.

There are some genuinely funny scenes, of course. Some of the biggest laughs involve the training at the hands of a karate instructor who tells Bruno that "a homosexual will most likely attack you from behind" and proceeds to act out a ‘victim’ disabling the Bruno character who wields massive black and white dildos. But too many scenes have Bruno performing his outrageous routines while his hapless victims just sit there, confused and speechless.

Documentary or drama?
Most humour usually comes from surprise. But it’s hardly surprising that orthodox Jews are shocked by Bruno cavorting around Jerusalem in high boots. Could we be surprised that redneck southerners are outraged by a display of live gay sex at a wrestling match? Is it strange that a group of beer-willing campers would fail to see the funny side of having Bruno as their bedfellow for the night?

Or that conservative congressman Ron Paul would leave rather hurriedly when Bruno strips off and takes a shine to him? Similarly, when Bruno takes a black baby onto a chat show, clearly using the child – whom he names OJ – as a publicity appendage in his misguided belief that it will propel him to stardom like Madonna or Angeline Jolie, it’s no wonder he doesn’t win over his African-American audience.

Some of the incidents serve to illuminate the darker side of the human soul. One particularly disturbing scene shows us that parents would do almost anything to get their children on TV. One mother has no problem with allowing her young children to dress up as Nazi officers, for example. Chilling.

The film is mostly fly-on-the-wall documentary. But some incidents in the movie are clearly contrived, such as the orgy scene in the house, although the crowd scenes at the wrestling match, the TV chat show audience and a genuinely funny skit at a fashion show clearly are real. But it’s not all candid camera by any means.

If anything, my fear is that the movie could even propagate homophobia. Baron Cohen is a superb comedian but he needs a better script, a firmer director and an understanding that shocking people is not necessarily clever entertainment.

In interviews, Baron Cohen says his idol is the great Peter Sellers. But Sellers avoided the kind of extreme toilet humour that is becoming Baron Cohen’s trademark. I hope that he finds better roles in the future, worthy of his phenomenal talent, that lift him out of the bowl.