Cross-country butt tour brings the absurd to Asbury Park

ASBURY PARK -- If something absurd were making its way across the country, it's no stretch of the imagination to figure out it would somehow wind up in Asbury Park.

Still, the giant butt that made its way to the city's oceanfront on the back of a flatbed truck turned heads and made people crane their necks and point in astonishment.

Standing 14 feet tall, the 1,600-pound derriere was the brainchild of comedian Kurt Braunohler, an Asbury Park native now living in Los Angeles who is making the sculpture the central focus of his pilot for Comedy Central called "Better, Dumber, Faster."

"It's about inserting a little bit of absurdity into the world to make people happy," Braunohler said at the end of the butt's weeklong cross-country trip on Tuesday. "It totally worked."

Braunohler said he initially planned to send the foam and metal posterior by freight train and record travelers' reactions at the boarding and final destination points of Los Angeles and Newark.

But when CSX Corp. refused to take it by rail, Braunohler said, he had to scramble to find alternate transportation - a flatbed truck.

"It turned out better because this way, so many people see it," Braunohler said.

The extra transportation cost meant Braunohler couldn't afford to bring a crew, so he took on the filming duties himself, he said. If Comedy Central picks it up, the pilot could air some time early next year, he said.

Averaging 11 hours on the road a day, Braunohler said he took the buttocks to Las Vegas; Bluff, Utah; Denver; Kansas City, Louisville, Ky; Charlotteville, Va.; and Washington, D.C., before winding up the tour in Asbury Park.

Along the way, he met a bunch of people who told him the butt-sighting brightened their day.

The trip had its notable moments.

Braunohler said he got pulled over by a police officer in the nation's capital for being on a road that didn't allow trucks. He didn't get a ticket, though.

"He said, 'I'm gonna give you a break because you're the first giant butt I've ever pulled over,'" Braunohler said.

In Denver, Braunohler woke up to find a Roman candle jammed into the butt where it didn't have a hole before, he said.

Before heading back, Braunohler is going to take the butt -- created by art designer Matthew Trotter and fabricated by Sereno Studios in Los Angeles -- for a brief visit to his mother's house in Oceanport before dropping it off to an art park in Charlottesville.

"They expressed an interest in having it," he said.

As Braunohler was pulling out of the Berkeley Oceanfront Hotel in Asbury Park, Joe and Susan Sblendorio couldn't miss the sculpture as they were packing up their car to head back to Virginia.

"Being here, it doesn't faze people," Susan Sblendorio said. "But it's cute."
