It’s been 10 years since the infamous Taylor Swift/Kanye West MTV VMAs moment and the specter of that incident still lingers over the show every year. However, it pales in comparison in terms of sheer hilarity to another MTV moment that happened in the same year: Sacha Baron Cohen shoving his bare arse in an unsuspecting Eminem’s face.
Let’s set the scene. The year was 2009, the MTV Movie Awards were on, and Cohen was about to release a new film about his then-popular fictional character, Brüno.
Since MTV still held a decent amount of relevance back then, Cohen decided to promote the film by appearing in character at the MTV Movie Awards. But since this is Sacha Baron Cohen we’re talking about, he went all in on it.
Presenting the award for Best Male Performance, Brüno (dressed as an angel and wearing only a jockstrap under the costume) entered the theatre by getting strapped to a bunch of wires and “flown” over the audience.
However, something went wrong with the harness and he ended up landing on top of Eminem with his bare arse right in the rapper’s face. Eminem wasn’t too pleased with some bloke’s buttcheeks pressed up right against him and he left the event in a huff after dropping a few F-bombs.
Now if this whole incident seems a little fishy, that’s because it is. Eminem later revealed that it was entirely staged and the pair (who are actually good friends IRL) practiced the stunt beforehand. The rapper said he went back to his hotel afterwards and proceeded to, ahem, laugh his arse off.
Unsurprisingly, the stunt made headlines for the sheer absurdity of it all but it was quickly overshadowed when the Taylor Swift/Kanye VMAs moment went down. It’s a bit of a shame because Sacha Baron Cohen shoving his jockstrap-wearing butt in Eminem’s face is objectively the funnier moment and deserved more of the spotlight.
For now we’ll just have to live with the thought that in another alternative universe we would’ve had Kanye shoving his bare butt in Tay Tay’s face while Sacha told Eminem “Imma let you finish”, and everyone will end up talking about the “Cohen/Eminem” moment 10 years later while Tay Tay and Kanye were left laughing their arses off in a hotel room at their ridiculous stunt.