Miley's sad twerky trot

REGULAR TATTLE readers know that we like an off-color joke as much as the next person, especially if the next person is the late Buddy Hackett, but there's a difference between devising clever euphemisms and standing by an open window waving your exposed junk at passers-by.

That's kind of what Miley Cyrus was doing at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night. The dancers at Delilah's were blushing.

No longer about music, the VMAs' sole purpose seems to be to push the envelope and celebrate crude behavior, and Miley delivered better than a UPS driver at Christmas.

A childlike one-piece as a costume? Check.

Giant-headed furries as backup dancers? Check.

Faux-self-pleasuring with a giant foam finger? Check.

Simulated backdoor sex with a married man dressed like a prison referee? Check again.

If Miley was twerking to continue to shed her good-girl image or scare the bejeebers out of any parents watching with tween girls, it was mission accomplished.

The comparisons to Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Pink, however, are ridiculous. What they do has elements of drama and comedy - at their worst they're bizarre and at their best they're performance art.

What Miley was doing didn't belong on MTV, it belonged on HBO's "G-String Divas."

Except those women were way classier.

And better dancers.

Miley's "performance" speaks to something very odd in our pop-music culture. The men of rock and rap videos have long objectified the barely dressed, slutty babes who danced and gyrated for their pleasure, but Miley has elevated that tongue-wagging backup dancer to center stage.

But she doesn't need a hair-band frontman or bejeweled rap star to satisfy her.

She has a big foam finger.

* The Environmental Media Association is honoring Matt Damon and Hayden Panettiere for their dedication to ecological causes.

The pair will be honored at its 23rd annual Environmental Media Awards this fall.

Damon will receive the Ongoing Commitment Award for his work with Water.org, the organization he co-founded that aims to bring safe water and sanitation to people around the world.

Panettiere will accept the Futures Award, which recognizes younger entertainers for their potential to be environmental activists. The "Nashville" star is active with the Whaleman Foundation, an oceanic research and conservation group.

* Tate Taylor, the Mississippi native who directed "The Help," said yesterday that he'll make a biographical feature film about James Brown in the state, starting this fall.

"Every frame will be shot in Mississippi. We're even doing Paris, France, in Mississippi. . . . Vietnam, as well, in Mississippi," Taylor said at the Mississippi Coliseum on the state fairgrounds in Jackson, where some scenes will be shot.

Taylor said he could know within a week who will play Brown.

"Those are tough shoes to fill," he said.

Almost as tough as Mississippi filling the shoes of Paris.

* Kate Gosselin - remember her? - has filed a lawsuit accusing her ex-husband, Jon, of stealing her hard drive and hacking into her phone and computer to get material for a tell-all book.

The federal lawsuit says he took the material for a book called Kate Gosselin: How She Fooled the World.

The suit, filed yesterday in Philadelphia, says the book was written by her ex-husband's friend, tabloid writer Robert Hoffman, but has since been pulled from Amazon.com because the material was obtained illegally.

* New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is suing Donald Trump, claiming that the real-estate mogul's Trump University promised to make students rich but instead steered them into expensive and mostly useless seminars.

Defiant Trump called Schneiderman a hack.

Schneiderman, in turn, said that Trump's name-calling was an attempt to distract the public from his fraud case.

Tattle's slogan: Trump U., where you can get a BS in BS.

- Daily News wire services contributed to this report.

Twitter: @DNTattle