It was predicted to be the summer of frugal camping, but it has turned out to be the summer of camp, with two figures towering over popular culture: Brüno and Jacko.

Not since Oscar Wilde advised the young that “one should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art” has camping it up been so now.

Of course in straitened times we no longer want to be straight: suddenly outlandish-is-us. When Michael Jackson died, and we were force-fed Billie Jean on every supermarket Tannoy, we realised with a jolt how much we missed the heyday of The Gloved One, the rubbery red and black Thriller suit, the glitter socks, the sheer epicene strangeness of his dancing. But at the same time we were salivating over a future feast of camp, wondering precisely what Brüno would do in his yellow leather lederhosen when finally released next week.

The fact that Sasha Baron Cohen’s Brüno has become an international brand long before he arrives in suburban cineplexes is a sign both of savvy marketing (the surprise descent wearing a white thong on the lap of the unfortunate Eminem at the MTV awards) and public fascination. The trend reaches tipping point with the high camp musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert running in the West End, and Britain’s Got Talent bringing low camp to family viewing.

Indeed, it doesn’t get much camper than our popular programming: Britain’s Got Talent, Jimmy Carr, Graham Norton’s Eurovision Song Contest, Strictly Come Dancing with Bruce Forsyth, and The X-Factor, or as Brüno recently said in an in-character interview in a gay magazine: “Simon Cowell is my gay icon. Ein totally straight man who dresses like he does and loves scheisse pop musik.”

If only Susan Sontag, the American intellectual who first clearly identified the phenomenon in her seminal 1964 essay Notes on “Camp”, were here today, she would be in cultural clover. Explaining camp, she went back again to grandmaster Wilde: “We should treat all trivial things very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.” This is precisely what Baron Cohen does throughout Brüno, using the silliest side of homosexuality to expose the mindless intolerance and gobsmacking stupidity of redneck America. It’s like Whicker’s World on acid.

That said, at a preview of Brüno (reviews of which are still embargoed), I wanted to go and have dinner instead, so icky was the cheesecake porn, and so sledgehammer were the jokes. It is revealing that Baron Cohen invented the Brüno character in the playground as a teenager. But his work fits Sontag’s definition: “To camp is a mode of seduction — one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another . . . for outsiders.”

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