Determined to watch a comedy last night, I made my way through the first 20 minutes of La Casa de Mi Padre before giving up and attempting Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator. While I can lowbrow with the best of them (have seen Talladega Nights more times than I care to count), I was truly hesitant about The Dictator because of its below-crappy reviews.
Surprisingly, I enjoyed it enough to be blogging about it in via this erotica space I share with Talon Rihai. Why, you may well ask. First and foremost, I confess, it's because I have a serious thang for Sacha Baron Cohen. Though his humor is hit-and-miss and his political zingers sometimes don't zing, I love his acting and the obvious pleasure he takes in it, plus I find him truly handsome, a combination of goofy and sexy that I just can't resist.
Like the best of comedians, he is willing to look like an asshole for a joke. From Borat's thongs to Bruno's liederhosen, I love his slapstick. And as a fellow Jew, I love his Jewishness. Even as he ventures into xenophobic shtick, he lets us in on the joke, for he isn't speaking Arabic or Kazakh, he's babbling nonsense with heaping doses of Hebrew.
Certainly, no one is going to call SBC a champion of women's issues, but I love that, alongside a Woody Allene or Mel Brooks type of sexist cluelessness, he doesn't hesitate to queer up his act. He may be a hubby and father of two, but he actively makes himself available for the queerest of fantasies by the roles he takes and the characters he creates.
The Dictator was an uneven film, to be sure, but it was, for me, memorable enough to be writing this. With a speech that links US capitalist democracy to a dictatorship, he pays homage to Chaplin (another trickster hottie) in The Great Dictator. And we can see not only Woody Allen mockumentary and Mel Brooks excess in his style, but more than a hint of Marx Brothers.
All this is to say, SBC: I'm diggin' what you're layin' down. And I'll be having you in a threesome with me and Sarah Silverman in my mind tonight.