Sacha Baron Cohen to Further Test Limits of Bad Taste with ‘Klown’ Remake

Whether he’s handing a plastic bag full of feces to a dinner party host, trying to coax Ron Paul into a hotel-room gay sex scandal, or getting face-raped by the massive phallus of an elephant while hiding inside the cavernous vagina of a second elephant, Sacha Baron Cohen’s a born button-pusher. His unending search for shock value has now led him to Denmark, the home nation of the excruciating comedy of discomfort Klown. A new item from Deadline notes that the prank-happy provocateur will bring his talents for awkwardness to a remake of the taboo-busting Danish cringe-fest, and more specifically, that foreign distribution rights have been snapped up by Annapurna International.

Born as a TV show and adapted into a feature film in 2010, Klown follows irresponsible man-children Frank Hvam and Casper Christensen (the writer-creators, portraying hopefully fictionalized versions of themselves) on a guys’ outing they dub the “Tour de Pussy.” But their cocks are repeatedly blocked by Hvam’s girlfriend’s 12-year-old son, who Hvam has brought along in a spectacularly misguided attempt at male bonding. Misunderstandings and unrepentant dickishness alike guide the trio into fiasco after fiasco, from becoming inadvertent child pornographers to ejaculating on a sleeping woman in what turned out to be a classic mix-up.

The source material has Cohen’s signature brand of loosely improvised assaults on good taste scrawled all over it, and they should make a natural fit for one another. But the back-and-forth patter of Klown‘s central pair was crucial to the film’s humor; Cohen will need to find an opposite before the project can move forward and begin production. But whose sense of humor is as sick as the man behind Bruno?