Is 'Brüno' good for the Jews?

CONTEXT AND point of view are everything. They're what separate an insightful gag in borderline taste from a tasteless joke that falls flat. Jewish performers like Sacha Baron Cohen, Larry David and Sarah Silverman all share offensive-yet-naïve stage personae. These seemingly oblivious characters charge through life, offending everyone in their path, but not always intentionally. They escort their audience through edgy routines that reveal a larger point of view within a specific context. Along with Sacha Baron Cohen, Larry David's show "Curb Your Enthusiasm" satirizes the way we overvalue (fake) celebrity and undervalue real history. Meanwhile, Sarah Silverman uses utter absurdity to remind us of the gravity of the Holocaust, not to make fun of it.

By playing a fascist, not to mention a loudly "out" homosexual, Baron Cohen forces audiences to confront their prejudices. His rationale seems to be: If you beat your enemy to the punch line by getting in the first and last word, even if you lose, you still win.

It's a dangerous game, though. How can Baron Cohen be sure that audiences "get" his meta-humor? All in the Family creator Norman Lear was appalled to discover that millions of viewers embraced Archie Bunker, a character he'd meant them to despise. Comedians Chris Rock and David Chappelle dropped certain routines about racial differences when they realized that some audiences liked them for the wrong reasons.

In an interview with Rolling Stone when Borat first came out, Baron Cohen explained the "minstrelsy" he employs in his anarchic humor: "When I was in university, there was this major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw, who said, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.' I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic."

I'm a fan of Sacha Baron Cohen, and respect the fact that we could all use a good laugh or two. But I'm also a rabbi, so much of his raunchy humor makes me deeply uncomfortable. It certainly isn't material for a Shabbat sermon.

That said, watching Brüno declare that fashion is more important than Darfur reminds us there are many real-life, shallow "Brünos" out there in the media world - deciding on a whim what the rest of us should wear, watch, read and think - than many of us care to believe. In that respect, Brüno may serve as a lesson to us all.

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