I've always found Sacha Baron Cohen's "Brüno" schtick simplistically hilarious: Flamboyantly gay Austrian journalist travels to America's homophobic heartland to wring laughs out of just how much those people fear and hate gay people.

But just as the hypocrisy construction allows liberally-minded people to freely ridicule Sarah Palin's kids for having sex (because it's hypocritical), razz Miss California for bearing her beasts (because it's hypocritical), and make fun of Larry Craig for acting gay (because it's hypocritical), the Sascha Baron Cohen construction allows liberally-minded people to freely laugh at gay shit—because we're really laughing at the Southern rednecks who are laughing at the gay shit, right?

A.O. Scott's New York Times review of Brüno's big-screen debut does a really excellent job of explaining this dynamic—while not devaluing Sacha Baron Cohen's as a humorist:

In his various incarnations — Ali G, Borat and now, at feature length, Brüno — Sacha Baron Cohen leads his audience in a two-step of squirming discomfort and smug affirmation. Like “Borat,” “Brüno” (Mr. Baron Cohen’s new vehicle, also directed by Larry Charles) offers both succor and sucker bait for liberal-minded viewers who may feel harassed and hemmed in by prevailing and ever-shifting cultural sensitivities.

We all know, for example, that it’s wrong to laugh at foreigners, that making fun of their accents and customs is worse than passé. But Borat, with his outlandish attitudes and offensive behavior, granted an exemption to anyone who was in on the joke. You could titter and guffaw at his backward, ignorant buffoonery because, of course, the real xenophobes were the people on screen who fell for the hoax that this guy was a journalist from Kazakhstan.

And we all know how Borat played in Kazakhstan. This time around, Brüno's impact is lessoned—as Scott points out, "the success and notoriety of [Borat] diminished the ranks of potential patsies"—but both of his targets (gays and homophobes) are on-hand on Cohen's home-turf. Will Cohen lose his audience by taking homosexuals down with homophobes? Or has he shrewdly keyed into an even larger fan base—people who hate gay people, and people who hate people who hate gay people?

In today's Washington Post, Monica Hesse dismissed the news of Nevada Senator John Ensign's affair with a staffer as . . . not scandalous enough. A crisis management rep provided the money quote, characterizing Ensign as "really vanilla."

But despite the decidedly consensual, un-kinky, over-18, non-prostitutional nature of Ensign's affair, the scandal satisfies the one usual requirement for criticism: it's hypocritical. Ensign is a member of the Promise Keepers, a Christian organization devoted to cultivating "men of integrity"—or dudes who wouldn't cheat. He cheated. Perfect!

So, when is hypocrisy not enough?

Earlier this week, I wrote about how razzing politicians for their hypocrisy is often used as a cover for less-valid personal critiques. And so, people who start out criticizing Sarah Palin's support of abstinence end up ridiculing her daughter for having sex. People who start out criticizing Carrie Prejean's opposition to gay marriage end up ridiculing her for disobeying the rules of another patriarchal tradition—the beauty pageant. People who start out criticizing Larry Craig's anti-gay policies end up ridiculing him for being gay.

And yet, people who start out criticizing John Ensign for his own hypocrisy don't really have anywhere to turn. There's no teen pregnancy, a la Bristol Palin. There's no topless photos, a la Prejean. There's no prostitute, a la David Vitter and Eliot Spitzer. There's no closeted homosexuality, a la Larry Craig and Jim McGreevey. There's no cancer-stricken wife, a la John Edwards. And there are no kinky texts, a la Mark Foley.

All there is is sex outside of marriage, and perhaps that particular behavior hits a little bit too close to home for most sex-scandal critics. So while we'd prefer Ensign and his fellow Promise Keepers not act so sanctimonious in public while cheating in private, most Americans won't sustain interest in the story because it won't make them feel better about themselves. Most Americans have cheated. The most infamous of political sex scandals stick because regular Americans can claim superiority over some peculiarity of the sexual encounter—they can protest that they weren't cheating when their partners had cancer; they weren't cheating with a prostitute; they weren't cheating with a gay man; they weren't cheating with kinky sex; they weren't cheating and got her pregnant.

Perhaps we should all take another look at the "hypocrisy" critique we've used on these other politicians as well. Are we criticizing them for being hypocrites? Or are we criticizing them for their sex being too kinky, too gay, too online, too knocked up, or too expensive? Do we really hate hypocrites, or do we mostly hate weirdos?

It is a simple formula for both comedy and political commentary:

Take a public figure (Sarah Palin) who holds disagreeable views (abstinence-only education). Zero in on an aspect of her personal life counter to those views (her own teen daughter, Bristol Palin, becoming pregnant). Reveal the comedic irony and/or hypocrisy of the public/private contrast. Repeat ad nauseam on blogs, 24-hour news channels, and late night talk shows.

We should all beware this construction. Though very easy to pull off—and often journalistically and comedically sound—it is a trap. And it will render us all hypocrites. Three lessons from history, after the jump.

SARAH PALIN

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: Too many to count, but in this case, it's the abstinence thing.

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: When Palin's 17-year-old daughter Bristol became pregnant months before Palin rose to political fame as John McCain's running mate in the 2008 presidential election, political commentators and comedians held up Bristol's pregnancy as evidence that abstinence is futile—even under the roof of your state's no-sex-before-marriage Governor.

IT'S A TRAP! The revelation came at the height of election season fervor, and liberal commentators ate Bristol's sexual activity up with a spoon. The term "knocked up" became par for the course. When the baby's father, Levi Johnston, told Tyra Banks that he and Bristol had practiced safe sex, Tyra et. al dismissed him as a liar. The late-night comedy cycle feasted on the Bristol-is-a-slut jokes. Even Palin family cheerleader Greta Van Susteren asked Bristol if she had been "lazy."

We forgot that even the most responsible of 17-year-old condom users don't put it on right every time. We forgot that condoms break. And we forgot that, when you're the governor's daughter in the small town of Wasilla, requesting birth control from your family doctor, seeking Plan B at a local pharmacy, or even buying condoms—anywhere—could cause such a shit-storm for you, your boyfriend, and your family, that it would have been hard to mount the courage to even approach the counter.

At some point, we forgot about why Bristol having sex was funny to begin with. The insane glee that we all derived from a teenage girl having sex before marriage became counter-intuitive—and downright creepy. We had crossed the hypocrisy bridge. We were no longer making a point about how young women should be free to choose to be sexually active. We no longer joked to show how bogus abstinence was. We joked to show that Bristol Palin was slutty, and that was enough to make it funny.

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CARRIE PREJEAN

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: During the Q-and-A section of  the 2009 Miss USA pageant, Miss USA California Carrie Prejean described her views on same-sex marriage this way:

"I think it's great that americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage, and in my country, and my family, I think that I believe that marriage should be a man or a woman. No offense to anyone out there, but that was how I was raised, and that's how I think it should be. Between a man and a woman. Thank you."

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: After rising to blogosphere infamy—with the help of question-asker Perez Hilton's videoblog declaring her a "bitch"—Prejean's past modeling career caught up to her. When topless photos of the 21-year-old Prejean surfaced on the Web, Prejean was accused of both violating her pageant contract and preaching inconsistent moral views. Who is she to preach good Christian values when she's flaunting her assets for cash?

IT'S A TRAP! Wait a second—since when did we start caring about women upholding the contractual obligations of beauty pageants? Pageants are among the most sexist and anti-feminist of American traditions. They encourage patriarchal views about the traditional roles women and men should hold in society. And guess what—gays don't have a place there.

But the patriarchy is also responsible for one of the most damaging of all hypocrisy constructions: the virgin-whore dichotomy. Shaming Carrie Prejean—a woman we've elevated through beauty pageants—for taking topless modeling photos is a very short leap for shaming gays and lesbians for expressing their sexuality. That's why this whole thing was hypocritical in the first place—but perhaps we're all too distracted by Carrie Prejean's boobs to remember. We may keep posting them in the interest of "revealing hypocrisy." But we all know the real reason they're on the Web: It's not hypocrisy anymore; it's hotness.

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LARRY CRAIG

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DISAGREEABLE VIEW: As a Republican Senator from Idaho, Craig often championed conservative moral values. William Saletan got specific in 2007, pointing out that Craig "helped to enact the military's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy," revealing his "anti-gay hypocrisy."

HYPOCRITICAL MOVE: In June of 2007, Craig was arrested for soliciting sex from a male undercover cop in the Minneapolis airport:

According to the report filed by the officer who arrested Craig at the Minneapolis airport in June, Craig stood outside the officer's bathroom stall for two minutes, repeatedly looked at the officer "through the crack in the door," sat in the stall next to the officer, tapped his foot, and gradually "moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot … within my stall area." Craig proceeded to "swipe his hand under the stall divider for a few seconds" three times, palm up, using the hand farthest from that side of Craig's stall. Most of these gestures, the officer explained, were known pickup signals in a room known (and hence under surveillance for) public sex. When the officer took Craig outside and told him so, Craig claimed he had been reaching down with his hand to retrieve a piece of paper from the floor. The officer wrote that no such paper had been on the floor.

IT'S A TRAP! I'll admit it—this is rich, fertile ground for the hypocrisy construction. Craig blows Palin and Prejean out of the water with this Perfect 10 hypocritical move: enacting anti-gay policies in law, and being gay in private. Jokes at Craig's expense were easy, valid, and very popular.

Conservatives, when not denying that any of this happened, joined in the shit-throwing. After all, this is the stuff homophobes' nightmares are made of—strange gay men attempting to have sex with them while they're taking care of business in a public restroom. For them, Craig reinforced the idea that homosexuals are sick and disgusting individuals just waiting to pounce on your unsuspecting bare penis. In other words, gays can pose a very real threat to their heterosexuality, and Craig proved it.

And yet, those who railed against Craig's institutionalized homophobia were the ones who took the most immense joy in the gay jokes. So—again—reveling in jokes about Larry Craig being gay began to lose their hypocritical anchor. On some level, the hypocritical construction allows people with pro-gay political views to indulge in some homophobic ribbing of their own. They see a rare window where making fun of gay sex is politically acceptable, and they sieze it. It's the same tale with Sarah Palin: People who support progressive sexual health policies, like comprehensive sex education, sieze the opportunity to make jokes about sluts. It's the same tale with Carrie Prejean: People who rail against patriarchal values, like "opposite marriage" and beauty pageants, sieze the opportunity to make sexist jokes.

So, let's all try not to descend too deeply into the hypocrisy construction's rabbit hole. Fall too far, and we become ripe for ironic commentary ourselves.