TVSquad

It looks like Eminem wasn't the real butt of Sacha Baron Cohen's prank at the MTV Movie Awards. (And yes, I do get paid by AOL to write jokes. God bless the writer's strike!)

Entertainment Weekly confirmed from an unidentified source close to the network that Cohen said the prank was staged and that Eminem wasn't really mad that he got a face full of ass.

EW also reported that Scott Aukerman, the show's head writer who comedy geeks will recognize as a Mr. Show actor/writer and one-half of the comedy duo The Fun Bunch, leaked the news on his blog. That entry seemed to have disappeared from his blog as fast as Eminem's ass-smelling face from the awards show.

A small amount of skepticism creeped through the interwebs after the moment, and rightfully so. Remember back when Triumph the Insult Comic Dog tried to get in the rapper's face during the 2005 MTV Video Music Awards and Eminem got all huffy with puppet master Robert Smigel? You know your ego is out of control when an inanimate dog has a better sense of humor than you.

It seems that Eminem has since grown a chuckle hump, if the story is indeed true and Marshall Mathers was in on the joke. It's also a brilliant one at that. Cohen is a born media miscreant who loves creating trouble in the media, and Eminem always seems to find new ways to cause trouble of his own. It was a perfect prank comedy marriage, even if such marriages are no longer allowed in California.