Thought Theater

Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Ali G, Borat, and Bruno, is apparently in full flim-flam mode...this time as a cage match wrestler in Arkansas. Cohen's next movie will feature Bruno, the flamboyant Austrian homosexual. Bruno has been known to travel to less than welcoming venues to stir things up...and he apparently succeeded by duping wrestling fans into witnessing what might be better described as a round of pin the tail...of your wrestling partner.

The unsuspecting audience who turned up for the Blue Collar Brawlin' event, lured by the promise of $1 beer, expected a night of old fashioned fisticuffs.

What they got was two men stripping down to their underwear, kissing and "rubbing one another", according to local police.

The men - believed to be actors - were then forced to run for their lives as the 1,600-strong crowd pelted them with beer and chairs.

A spokesman for Baron Cohen declined to say whether he was behind the prank.

But the comedy star is currently in the US filming undercover as his latest creation, Bruno, a camp Austrian fashion reporter. A Bruno film is due in cinemas later this year.

Posters for Blue Collar Brawlin' promised: "Hot Chicks, Cold Beer, Hardcore Fights" and were accompanied by pictures of a scantily clad woman.

Organisers of the event had invited police to attend and tipped them off that a character named "Straight Dave" would goad a planted audience member into the ring for a fight, only to end up in a "romantic embrace" similar to the one between Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell in the film Talladega Nights.

The man-on-man display "went right up to the line" of the city's morality laws, Sgt Holland said.

Bruno also duped a former Mossad agent and a Palestinian academic into a spoof interview on the Middle East conflict, asking them to explain the difference between Hamas and hummus.

If you'd like to see Bruno in action, you can link to video clips of him interviewing a pastor who offers reparative therapy to gays here, cheerleading at a football game and interviewing one of the players in Alabama here, at a barn dance in Georgia here, and talking about music with Christians here.

I've included a copy of the poster used to advertise the event below. As I looked at the image, I couldn't help but think that the "positioning" of the two wrestlers was intentional and funny to those who were in on the gag...but not obvious enough, to the unsuspecting wrestling fan, to give away the scam.