• Tea-Bagging for Dollars

  Posted Tuesday, June 02, 2009 2:01 PM | By Jody Rosen
  
  
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  It is now being widely reported that Sasha Baron Cohen's aerial assault on Eminem at Sunday's MTV Movie Awards was staged. This seemed obvious from the outset—no matter how well Eminem's post-addiction 12-stepping is going, it beggars belief that he could react to a prank of this nature with such Zen-like restraint. God knows, men have been pummeled by rappers' bodyguards for lesser offenses than a nationally televised tea-bagging.
  
  And so we are left to contemplate an icky publicity stunt, designed to drum up business for Eminem's new album, Baron Cohen's forthcoming Bruno movie, and MTV itself. As the cable network, with palpable desperation, sought to replicate its past awards show succès de scandales—Howard Stern's Fartman flight from the rafters; Eminem's showdown with Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog—viewers were treated to the spectacle of two talented and presumably self-respecting artists publicly humiliating themselves in a witless shock-comedy sweat-act, complete with schwanz jokes that would have bombed at Grossinger's 60 years ago. 
  
  That Eminem and Baron-Cohen, who have both demonstrated comedic genius in the past, didn't recognize the banality of this gag (as Paris Hilton evidently did) speaks to the lengths to which celebrities will go in pursuit of viral-video success, which, these days, is the best promotion, the real fame. Forget the rapper and the comedian and all of the glittering A-listers on hand—the elephants in the room Sunday night were the dancing baby, the "Charlie bit me!" kid, and the Chocolate Rain dude. Of course, the way things are going, at next year's awards there will be actual elephants in the room, moving their bowels on Andy Samberg's head. LOL!
  
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  Filed under: Eminem Bruno, MTV, awards shows, viral video
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