The crowds came to see cage fighters beat each other to a pulp — but instead they saw two men kissing, gyrating and "going right up to the line" of local morality laws.
Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of Borat and Ali G, is suspected of being behind two cage-fighting events in the US state of Arkansas, both of which ended in a homoerotic spectacle.
At both of the June events — "Red, White and Blood" in Texarkana and "Blue Collar Brawlin" in Fort Smith — crowds reportedly in excess of 1000 people booed and threw cups of beer as two actors stripped to their underwear, kissed and rubbed against each other.
Readers of a mixed martial arts website, many of them horrified by the experience, recounted details of the prank in an online forum.
Punters were charged just $5 to enter the event and were plied with $1 beer, but were also told to leave their phones and cameras in their cars. They were also made to sign release forms, saying they were willing to appear on camera.
T-shirts reading "Straight Dave's United Straights of America", emblazoned with pictures of guns, beers and bikini-clad breasts, were handed out at the event and crowd members were encouraged to sing stridently heterosexual songs.
At the Fort Smith event, a series of "unevenly matched" fights followed, with a character named "Straight Dave", who some witnesses identified as Cohen, coming out to goad the crowd between the bouts.
"Towards the end a guy got into the ring with Borat [and] staged a short fight and before long Borat had him pinned against the cage kissing him as the stands were clearing from the homo activity," read one comment.
"I looked back to see Borat on his knees in front of the unknown man, you can figure the rest."
The crowd reportedly started to throw the beer and free T-shirts at the kissing men, who ran down a specially prepared tunnel to escape.
The events were advertised on website forums such as Craigslist and promised "hot girls, cold beers [and] hardcore fights".
Cohen is currently working on a new film revolving around a gay Austrian reporter with a penchant for mesh T-shirts. The film's working title is Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt.
Earlier this week it was reported that Cohen had tricked a former Israeli intelligence officer and a Palestinian academic into discussing the difference between Hamas and hummus.
The UK actor first became popular with Da Ali G Show in 2000, but was propelled to mega-stardom after he released Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan in 2006.
Cohen's bumbling, sexist, prostitute-loving Kazakh journalist character deceived Americans and Romanian villagers into making fools of themselves on camera, leading to several lawsuits against the actor.
His stunts included convincing a bar full of people in a small US town to repeatedly sing "throw the Jew down the well", and presenting a bag full of excrement to his hostess at a dinner party.
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