Can it be? Another worthwhile movie released right on the heels of last week’s superb Public Enemies in a truly awful summer that has passed off dreck like Night at the Museum 2, Ice Age 3, Terminator 4, and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 as event movies? Well, it’s not all bad; Pixar’s pleasantly odd Up and JJ Abram’s Star Trek reboot were nothing short of transcendent. But we haven’t seen anything even remotely edgy at the multiplex until this week’s Brüno.

If your favorite comedians are inoffensive types like Sinbad and Gallagher, you probably love the bland rom-com idea of “comedy” that Hollywood puts out: The Proposal, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, I Love You Beth Cooper, blah blah blah. But for those of us whose comic tastes run closer to George Carlin or Richard Pryor, it’s hard to think of a decent studio comedy from the past few years without a Judd Apatow connection. Aside from the slightly unhinged The Hangover (which is fun, but still pretty tame) and the phenomenal trio of Danny McBride, Jody Hill and Ben Best – the wonderfully demented team behind Observe and Report and the future classic HBO series Eastbound & Down - I’m coming up blank.

But Observe and Report barely recouped its production costs and Eastbound & Down struggled for ratings. While most risky comedy plays to devoted cult fringes, Sacha Baron Cohen is able to go out into the world with a handheld camera and what looks like a $300 budget and come back with a $100 million blockbuster. And he doesn’t pull any punches to do it either. Brüno is pissing people off, and that alone is a miracle in a marketplace where comedy is audience-tested and focus-grouped and homogenized to the point of irrelevance.

And better yet, it’s absolutely hilarious. I have to think way back to 2004′s Anchorman or 1999′s South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut to remember the last time I laughed harder in a theater. It also ranks with the best material from the Brüno character, which is something that I couldn’t say of Borat. As funny as that film was, none of its bits came close to the brilliance of the original segments from Da Ali G Show. Seriously, does getting pervy with Pamela Anderson at a book signing really match the cowboy bar singalong of “Throw The Jew Down The Well (So My Country Can Be Free)”? Clearly not.

Brüno‘s relentless mockery of our vapid celebrity culture also gives it a relevance that Borat‘s racist comedy of manners didn’t have. You’ve undoubtedly read a dozen reviews that mention the botched attempt at making a Ron Paul sex tape or the “straight pride rally” that ends the film, but you probably haven’t read about its most shocking scene, which has nothing to do with sex or cursing or nudity or Paula Abdul. The audience I watched the film with stared in slack-jawed silence as stage parents hellbent on living vicariously through their children gleefully offered up their babies for an ill-defined photo shoot including crucifiction, rusty machinery, drug-testing, high speed vehicles, and babies dressed like Nazis pushing other babies dressed in concentration camp rags into baby-sized ovens. Baron Cohen sometimes goes for cheap laughs, but moments like these reflect a Kaufman-esque genius that few comedians today can match.

The big news this morning was that even though Brüno did well at the box office, it only earned a C from the audience-polling firm Cinemascore, indicating that a lot of people were unpleasantly surprised by what they saw. I’d be willing to bet that letter grade is the average of a whole lot of A’s and F’s. For those of us who are overjoyed that an unlikely marquee star like Sacha Baron Cohen is making comedy dangerous again, this is one for the ages. The rest of you can go catch a rerun of According To Jim somewhere.