Bruno and Moliere: Comedy without Apology

Here are three potential interpretations of Bruno I’ve been hearing recently (okay, four):

— Bruno is about surprising people into revealing ugly truths about themselves, like Borat
— Bruno is a piece of stunt cinema done for shock value, like Jackass
— Bruno is (alternatively) a shameless revel in queerbashing / a clever indictment of queerbashers

Its episodic structure plays into each of these thematic approaches at times. The visual style, format and pacing are pretty similar to Borat, and it has a lot of similar set pieces and gags. It has a lot of gay jokes of questionable kosherness. All true and welcome. But these all seemed subplots, side themes to me, not really the main thrust of the piece – not what it was about.

My gut impression, which thinking about it more has only confirmed, was that Bruno was a much older sort of comedy, a comedy that followed a self-obsessed symbol of vice through a society that didn’t necessarily deserve better, but which at least offered the comfort and amusement of being hilariously consistent. Bruno immediately reminded me of Moliere — the French writer who brought us such Top 40 hits as The Hypocrite, The Misanthrope and The Imaginary Invalid.

And in thinking about the comedy of Moliere, where it sits in the tradition of comedy, and where Bruno sits among today’s comedy offers us some insight on one of the questions I think needs to be asked a lot more critically of our cultural arbiters:

When we laugh at our vices and failures, why must we insist they be fixed, or even be fixable?

All Moliere’s comic heroes are blinded by self-love. Instead of learning to know themselves, and growing wiser, they love themselves uncritically and sink into vice, folly or melancholy madness. Like Panurge or Adolphe, they magnify their own importance in the general scheme of things, devalue those around them who do not agree with them, and remove reason from the public domain, turning it into an instrument whose only function is to justify private passion and designs. Having failed to understand themselves, Moliere’s fools also fail to understand the shape of the world they live in; their careers are a series of comic blunders and accidents which result from what Celimene calls ‘this great blindness which afflicts all of us with respect to ourselves.’

— Andrew Calder, from Moliere: The Theory and Practice of Comedy

Sacha Baron Cohen’s big three Ali G Show characters are ironic in parallel ways. Ali G has lowbrow, low-status tunnel vision, which tests the highbrow, high-status tunnel vision of the people he interviews. Borat has prejudices based on where he is from, and he draws out the prejudices we have because of where we are from. In the show, Bruno is so superficial and obsessed with sex that he reveals the superficiality and sex obsession of others. (The line from Mark’s Alabama videos posted earlier this week: “Being gay is the new coolest thing!” is very telling and important to remember)

But Bruno in the movie is not a lot like Bruno in the show. Bruno in the movie isn’t just obsessed with being cool, or with his sexuality, he’s obsessed with himself. He doesn’t so much aspire to qualities or to draw them out of people as seek to fully realize himself and bring them along for the ride.

This makes him very different than Sacha Baron Cohen’s other characters. Bruno is more motivated in this movie, and he follows more of a straightforward (heh) narrative, than the other Ali G thoroughbreds ever do. Bruno doesn’t just behave in this way to get laughs or as an intellectual exercise, he has a grounded point of view and objective.

And when he’s misbehaving, the scenes are much more often about him. Borat is about the reactions Borat gets from people. Bruno is about Bruno. It’s about his story, his sexuality, his identity, his ultimate failure to reform or reinvent himself after the loss of his Austrian television show, and why this is funny rather than sad. Nobody really cared whether Borat managed to kidnap Pamela Anderson (the whole idea is absurd in a different way than Celebrity Max Out! is) – the big question was whether Pamela Anderson staged it or not (she did).

Bruno is more scripted than of Borat, and my guess is that some of the antics that looked spontaneous were at least partially staged. But that’s fine, because most of the comedy in Bruno doesn’t really depend on the events coming as a surprise – because most of the reactions from people are totally reasonable and not embarrassing to them in the slightest. Does anyone doubt that a new solder who acts like Bruno would get yelled at? That Celebrity Max Out! would fail in focus groups? (I love how Celebrity Max Out! Is mostly just footage of Bruno dancing. It definitely reinforces his self-obsession. As does the moment where he dresses like Indiana Jones, or when he seems totally unperturbed by the fact that Harrison Ford more or less flips him off.)

It is the business of comedy to represent all the defects of men, and above all, men of our own time.

— Moliere, L’Impromptu

This all gets down to what Bruno is trying to accomplish, how that is different from what other comedies try to accomplish, and, in turn, what comedy in general is trying to accomplish.

It’s pretty uncomfortable that Bruno is a huge gay stereotype and a ridiculous person for most of the movie. It is much more uncomfortable that Bruno is a huge gay stereotype and a ridiculous person at the end of the movie. Within the bourgeois corner of world Overthinking It occupies, as in Renaissance Europe during the days of Moliere, we are often trained that, if a social group is under the tacit moral protection of genteel society, you can only mock that group’s faults if, in the end, such a group either teaches a moral lesson and recovers its dignity or actively subverts a specific social wrong.

You can make fun of a corrupt priest if in the end the priesthood in general is able to reassert itself and show the comic priest character was an outlier, a bad apple who needed reform. An oversexed noblewoman who reveals the hypocrisy of her unfaithful husband is a clever moralist, but an oversexed noblewoman who implies something about the character of noblewomen in general is unacceptable.

A childhood bully can be sent home with a bucket of paint on his head, but there must always be hope for him to rejoin active society and become an actuary or something. He certainly can’t just be on the street the next day still being an angry, domineering idiot and still beating up children. That would say something unacceptable about children. And our sensibilities that are so moralized by their civility will not abide it (however true it might be). It causes real pain, and portraying fictional faults for laughs runs the risk of spreading unacceptable falsehoods about people whose dignity must be preserved.

I would even put marriagable, educatable men in as a protected group. This isn’t about political correctness – it’s about legitimacy; that people persist in their collective identities under the protection of polite society. It is okay for a married man’s alcoholic bowling buddy to continue to be a screw-up, but the married man must reform, because polite society has expectations and hopes for these sorts of people – blueprints – that it feels uncomfortable damaging. Seth Rogan’s friends can keep smoking pot, but Seth Rogan has to stop, because it is not okay for dads of people who matter to be stoners.

It’s like when Harvey Pekar points out the hypocrisy of Revenge of the Nerds in American Splendor. Anthony Edward’s happy ending doesn’t give him the right to stand up to true outcasts, because he is protected from encountering real hardship or being a real outcast.

The fool held up to ridicule should not be one of those men whom we hold in respect, nor should he be someone whose behavior deserves punishment or pity.

– Cicero (probably a misquote, but not my fault)

We bourgeoisie insist that comedy must not be too cruel to the legitimate, but it’s an old value system with old roots. Supposedly, according to classical literature (Aristotle in particular), being too mean with your comedy makes it cease to be funny. And in contemporary society, there is a belief that failing to pull back on this cruelty has the power to remove social legitimacy, so it is dangerous.

You can see the influence of this concept in most Hollywood comedies. Look at the major films of Will Ferrel, which are in a lot of ways similar to Bruno and Borat – they feature protagonists who embody a specific sort of undesirable set of characteristics that are laughable to us, because they reflect the flaws in ourselves and in people we know.

Ricky Bobby is obsessed with winning and competition to the detriment of pretty much everything else in his life. Ron Burgundy has a warped sense of how awesome he is, especially relative to and in the eyes of women. Both of them fail at life because of their arrogance, but both of them reform and recover and get back everything they loved and more.

Comedy is morally useful and justifiable, this sort of philosophy contends, because it points out our flaws, lets us laugh at them, and gives us hope to become better people.

Moliere, among others in the New Comedy, as it was called, turned this on its ear. But they weren’t the first, and they weren’t the last.

Bruno is never reformed. His attempt to un-gay himself ends in a shower of beers making out with his assistant at a fraudulent underground MMA match. Borat, though he less of a fully formed character in a different sort of movie, still does not make apologies for himself or go hug a Jew at the end of the film.

Of course, this is somewhat misleading. Bruno’s flaw isn’t that he’s gay. Bruno’s flaw is that he’s a huge oversexed attention whore who sees his own celebrity as the biggest, most important thing in the world. He thinks his own dance moves are about on par with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  He is so fixated on getting the superficial things he wants that he practically sexually assaults Ron Paul. The way he throws his homosexuality at everybody is a secondary joke about the customs of his time.

And the movie does plenty to try to undermine those who seek to illegitimize LGBT persons. But Bruno doesn’t make apologies, so neither should I. In order to make his jokes about oversexed attention whoring, self-obsession and celebrity, Bruno makes a whole lot of shameless gay jokes. Cruel ones. And it deserves none of the forgiveness the bourgeoisie might want to muster for one of its favorite sons.

Because what is the worth of that rubric? Why should a system that says Bruno ought not to exist as a movie be called upon to pardon it? I thought Bruno was hilarious and awesome, so I say, let that system – the system that requires us to be kind when we mock the flaws of the people of our time – judge what it will judge and fail where it will fail. Then, let us disregard it when we do not want to hew to its purposes.

They are mirrors held up to the public, in which we should never admit to seeing ourselves.

— Moliere, La Critique de l’Ecole des femmes

The trick with Bruno, and indeed the trick with Moliere, is how to laugh at it. Because it is certainly not amoral to laugh at the flaws of a ridiculous person who persists obliviously in his ridiculousness – you are making a value judgement about an undesirable behavior. The laughter is not just the sound of a lesson landing in your brain, it is a recognition of the truth of what is going on – the degree to which it represents the flaws of our own time and all of us.

Moliere’s style of comedy thrives when people do not take the ridicule of behavior personally – when they acknowledge  people have flaws, and that admitting to their existence does not mean one is inviting personal disrespect on an essential level.

Moliere’s audience wanted to be ridiculed – they would approach him and list their flaws for him in the hopes of appearing in his plays. When people see a person like themselves being made fun of, and they are unable to separate themselves from it just a little bit and laugh at people and the world and how it is – when they can’t do that, well it tends to wither and fail.

Cohen’s is similar, even when it isn’t as heavily narrativized. When we laugh at “Throw the Jew down the Well,” it is not just because Southerners or Cowboys are anti-Semitic, we’re laughing at something we all know but aren’t really at liberty to talk about publicly for fear of getting too personal; which is that anti-Semitism is still out there and alive and well in America, and that it is a ridiculous behavior worthy of our derision.

Now, we can laugh at it safer when we are not threatened by it personally – so, in that sense, Borat’s existence is a very good sign. We can laugh at how anti-Semitic he is because we do not fear in our guts that behavior is not strong enough in our own time to hurt us or our friends. Oh, we fear it like Steven Colbert fear bears (justifiably), but not like we fear something like cancer.

So, yes, Bruno is a gay stereotype, but let’s be honest, a lot of us have seen behavior like that in our gay friends, in our straight friends and in ourselves. Our own little sense of our sexual grandiosity. Our overestimation of our own fame, attractiveness or excellence. As long as we put somebody else’s face on it, place it within the refuge of the performing arts, we can laugh at it without the reality of having to face it carry with it the hurtful effects that prompt people who do not see movies like this to stand outside the theatre and decry it.

(Not that anybody did that with Bruno)

And in the end, let’s be honest, do we really expect such things to get better? I mean, it’s nice when the Blades of Glory guys discover the value of friendship or whatever, but when that celebrity I didn’t recognize says that Jamie Lynn Spear’s fetus ought to be aborted because of her insufficient celebrity – I’m going to come out and say I think that sentiment is a real part of our culture, and I don’t think it’s going away. It’s something we’re all welcome to laugh at, but I don’t expect it to be reformed. Extra ain’t going anywhere folks, so we might as well laugh at it.

When I classify comedy and drama for people, I often say, “Drama is about people changing. Comedy is about people not changing.” If we divide the world of comedy into Ron Burgundies and Brunos – which path for comedy do you think is proper, superior, or more justified? Ron ends up the same, but redeemed. Bruno just ends up Bruno, still an idiot, still a lost cause, even with Bono doing backup vocals.

Does this strike a moral chord with anyone? A comedic one? Sound off in the comments!