“Why is being gay so out this season?” asks Bruno, a loopy boytoy fashionista. The question is being posed to a real-life preacher who runs an “ex-gay”ministry.

Bruno is one of Sascha Baron Cohen’s repertory of ditzy interviewer characters. (At right, a rare — and rather handsome — picture of the comic, out of character, as himself.)

Like Cohen’s more famous idiots — the clueless Kazakhi “Borat” (the subject of a movie that is now packing them in at the multiplexes) or the syntax-impaired gansta-rapper “Ali G” (late of HBO) — Bruno is always posing improbable questions to unsuspecting real-life dupes.

Usually more at home on the red carpet or backstage at New York’s Fashion Week, Bruno (Cohen in character, at left) speaks in a vacuous Teutonic accent full of hysterical Eurotrash pretensions.

With club kids and twitty designers, he is in his element, a little too much so. All he is likely to get from this crew are nods of agreement. On the thin line between fabulous and stupid, verbal skills rank low with the fashion crowd; nodding agreement and great shoes are everything. So some of Bruno’s runway interviews have a stale, stagey humor; too many of his “trendsetters” seem in on the joke and have decided to play along — dully. (Outlandish gets tedious very quickly.)

Thus, we knew we were in for more nasty fun when Cohen took Bruno and his fashion-victim wardrobe on the road, through the American Sunbelt, and set him lose on a populace famously lacking in a sense of irony.

In the HBO clip that follows, the “ex-gay” preacher answers each of Bruno’s queries in an impervious, vacuum-sealed drawl that keeps plodding on even as the questions spiral out into ever more outrageous sexual territory.

The point of this brand of “Candid Camera” comedy is, of course, let’s make fun of the slow kids. No matter how clueless the gag question seems, the sincere and thoughtful answer is always by many magnitudes more absurd.

Everyone likes to think they’re in on the joke. Thus, the usual critical take on Cohen’s hit movie, Borat (its marquee titled shortened from Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan — a sample of how the character speaks) is that of an exposé, showing up Americans as bigoted boors. However, Christopher Hitchens — as we would expect from him — offers a contrary and actually more nuanced reading:

I knew this would happen. I pick up my copy of the New Statesman, London’s leftist weekly, to find a review of Borat … as “Sacha Baron Cohen’s exposure of crass Americana”…The author, Ryan Gilbey, proceeds to say the following:

A redneck rodeo crowd shows no compunction about cheering Borat’s gung-ho speech about Iraq, clearly not realizing that what he actually said was: “We support your war of terror!” And it’s shocking to witness the tacit acceptance with which Borat’s ghoulish requests are greeted. Trying to find the ideal car for mowing down gypsies, or seeking the best gun for killing Jews, he encounters only compliance among America’s salespeople.

Oh, come on. Among the “cultural learnings of America…” is the discovery that Americans are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse …

The joke, in other words, may well be on the prankster. [At right, the clueless Borat appears in the much maligned "mankini," an actual swimsuit style, we are told, popular around the Black Sea.]

I thought the same about Da Ali G Show. As far as one can tell, most youth culture is as inarticulate and illiterate and mannerless as Sacha Baron Cohen made it out to be: The elderly dupes who did their best to respond (Gen. Brent Scowcroft on the anthrax/Tampax distinction being the most notable) were evidently resigned in advance to quite a low standard of questioning. You can see the same fixed expressions on the faces of politicians when they attend a “real” event, like Rock the Vote, where wry, likable smiles are obligatory, and the only dread is that of appearing uncool…

…It’s that attitude of painfully maintained open-mindedness and multiculturalism that is really being unmasked and satirized by our man from the ’stan. In what other country could such a character talk his way into being invited to sing the national anthem at a rodeo — where the horse urine is not so highly prized, and where horse excrement, and indeed all excrement, is still a term of abuse?

Yes, Christopher, Sasha Baron Cohen is a not very nice person. But then neither is the smug “gay converter” in our clip, who makes such a big deal out of dramatically announcing that he has “eight children.” We love how Bruno fricasees this pompous ass in his own juices.

MONEY EXCHANGE:
Preacher: … in fact, right now I am teaching through the book of Romans, and that’s in the New Testament and in the book of…
Bruno: Great. I love Romans.

RUNNER-UP EXCHANGE:
Bruno: After I’m converted could I choose to spend my life with a chick … with a dick?
Preacher: (stunned pause, then…) Uhmm… you’re talking about someone who’s had some kind of … operation?
Bruno: Yeah, he’s almost all the way there but he’s just got a little something to remind me of the good old days