British satirist Sacha Baron Cohen took a character from his offbeat HBO series Da Ali G Show, and turned him into an international movie sensation in the anything-goes 2006 film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, sending a Kazakhstan TV reporter across the United States to explore its foibles and to stalk actress Pamela Anderson.

People are still laughing.

Don’t expect lightning to strike twice with Cohen’s latest, Bruno, which chronicles the further adventures of another of his Da Ali G Show characters. Although Bruno has a bit more plot than simply the blackout-type sketches that had people roaring at Borat, the result is more scattershot and, as the film rolls on, redundant. Comedies should be short, quick and fast. Bruno weighs in at only 83 minutes, but at that it seems long and labored as it tries to dredge laughs out of the same material again and again.

As he did in Borat, Cohen sets out to skewer American hypocrisy and foibles in Bruno, this time specifically with comic explorations of homophobia and our unquenchable passion for celebrities.

A lot of the gags are done in Candid Camera style. Cohen and director Larry Charles, who has a bent for subversive cinema honed by his work on Borat and last year’s Bill Maher documentary Religulous, which poked fun at religious dogma, use hidden cameras or subterfuge to capture people off guard in inane situations.

One wonders, however, how much the people being set up are unaware of Cohen’s motives and how much they are a part of it.

Certainly former 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul seems taken by surprise as Cohen’s Bruno brings him into a hotel bedroom, locks the door, lights a candle and makes a pass at him. Paula Abdul, too, seems startled by what transpires when she arrives at a rented house that has no furniture and is asked to sit on the back of one of the several Mexican gardeners Cohen has placed around the living room to serve as chairs and tables. She flees when asked to eat sushi which is wheeled into the room atop a naked man. And certainly there’s wild comedy and even danger for Cohen when he turns up in Jerusalem wearing some religious garb with black shorts and is chased down the street by Orthodox Jews.

But did the three Arkansas hunters, whom Bruno accompanies on a camping trip in hopes of making him more manly, not know what was going on when the cameras were rolling and Bruno began making homosexual advances?

Bruno is an Austrian fashionista whose TV fashion show is canceled and his career ruined when his Velcro outfit causes a disastrous runway incident during Milan’s fashion week. Disgraced and sent packing, Bruno heads for Los Angeles, intent on becoming “the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler.” Accompanied by the only person in the world who finds Bruno “amazing,” his beleaguered assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten), he invests in a pilot for a celebrity TV show. But this also ends in disaster.

Ever in pursuit of something that will turn him into an international sensation, Bruno tries everything he can think of. He heads to the Middle East to bring the Israelis and Palestinians to the peace table where, unfortunately, he confuses the terrorist group Hamas with hummus and later raises the ire of a terrorist leader with ethnic insults. He later takes a page from the celebrity portfolios of Madonna and Angelina Jolie, bringing home a black African child. In one of Bruno’s funniest moments, he turns up on a Dallas TV talk show with the baby, horrifying the show’s mostly black and apparently unsuspecting TV audience with tales of his own homosexuality (Bruno has dressed the child in a T-shirt that reads “Gayby”) and how he swapped an iPod for the kid.

Much of the film revolves around outrageous gay gags, often taking pot shots at people’s on-camera reactions or daring us in the audience to be shocked. He does unsettle those hunters. He taunts homophobic Christian protesters carrying anti-gay placards. He turns tables at a wrestling cage match in an arena packed with hollering self-proclaimed heterosexuals. He mimes oral sex with the spirit of Milli, of Milli Vanilli. He visits an Alabama pastor who is a “gay converter,” pretending he wants to change his sexual preference. He joins a swinger’s party where, apparently, swinging doesn’t encompass anything with a gay tinge.

Some of this is briefly amusing. Some of it makes one cringe. Much of it simply goes on too long as Cohen and Charles belabor the point. In short bursts these segments may have looked hilarious. But strung together there are too many times when it seems the filmmakers are beating a dead horse.

**Bruno

Starring: Sacha Baron Cohen, Gustaf Hammarsten, Paula Abdul, Bono, Sting, Elton John, Snoop Dogg, Slash.

Rated: R, contains sex, nudity, violence, profanity, adult themes.