Sacha Baron Cohen's attempts to establish Ali G as a global star at the MTV Europe Music Awards last night foundered on the rocks of international indifference.
At the enormous bash in Frankfurt, a string of typically risqué gags were met with stony silence from the largely German audience.
They say that humour is an international language but the theory was proved incorrect as the concept of a white man pretending to be a black man from Staines was lost on all but the British contingent of the 1bn viewers watching.
MTV Germany had already lobbied hard for a different presenter after last year's Ali G experience when a couple of anti-German gags by the Channel 4 character, appearing to present an award, didn't go down too well.
They were overruled by international MTV bosses, who felt Ali G would be an ideal exponent of the cutting edge image they seek to project.
That decision looked suspect as American and European celebrities and audience members were left nonplussed at his peculiarly British sense of humour.
That they were far better disposed to the earnest histrionics of Depeche Mode or Limp Bizkit speaks volumes.
Damon Albarn's anti-war rant when collecting an award for his work with Gorillaz also went down like a lead balloon.
Much about the ceremony was curiously downbeat despite the huge effort that goes into organising and promoting the centrepiece of the network's output.
After several big international stars pulled out in the wake of September 11, including Destiny's Child and Janet Jackson, it was left to Kylie to provide a bit of sparkle with a show-stopping opener.
As gangs of clipboard-wielding organisers patrolled the periphery of the show, ensuring that guests, journalists and liggers had the requisite passes, the "talent" was processed with production-line efficiency through the gargantuan public relations machine built for the night.
After presenting an award or performing, the stars were shepherded into the press conference area to face a phalanx of several hundred hacks, flown from the four corners of the world to keep this MTV gong show high on the list of events that matter in the post September 11 world.
And obediently the world's press, television and radio sat slumped watching the event on monitors, ready to capture their anodyne soundbites for dissemination round the world.
And if that wasn't enough to generate the publicity, celebrities were then led, by turn, to the photocall area, then the strictly controlled one-on-one interview room and then finally, the MTV-controlled live web chat.
Although the internet was not on the list of MTV's priorities, it did for the first time allow the show to go out live on the web ahead of its broadcast on TV.
The webcast was subject to a one-hour time delay thanks to fears over Mr G's jokes about drugs, booty, gang-bangs at his hotel room and bonking Boris Becker.
In the Bedouin tent-style environs of the record company inner circle Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst celebrated what he called, somewhat unconvincingly, the best night of his life. Outside, Ali G slipped away largely unnoticed.
