Borat

Borat In KazakhstanBorat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (IMDB) is—as the title makes relatively clear—a fake documentary by Sacha Cohen. The preview shows Cohen as Borat Sagdiyev, wandering from one excruciatingly socially awkward situation to the next, all the while with an ingratiating grin on his face that begs forgiveness for not understanding our great culture while, at the same time, apologizing for the backwardness of his own. In a word, he’s disarming—enough so that he fooled people into making some pretty damning statements of their own.

Borat Make Funny Joke On Idiot Americans! High-Five! (Time) is a well-written article about the cult of Borat. One of the more interesting things is that, though his humor is extremely raw, critics are more likely to assume that he has a higher purpose. Unlike the gentlemen of Jackass, who dress up in thongs and jump into inhumanly cold water, when Borat dresses in a one-piece thong, it’s some sort of comment on society. Where the gentlemen of Jackass readily admit that they’re in it just for laughs, Cohen refuses to even interview as himself anymore, so it’s impossible to hear from him what he thinks of what he’s doing. This is probably a good thing, as his performance is far from over; once the experiment has run its course, he may see fit to tell us what it was all about. Or not. Andy Kaufman, who similarly transformed himself for months at a time, rarely saw fit to let the world in on his jokes.

“The giant mustache, the mesh underwear, the car dragged by mules, the wine made of fermented horse urine–sure, it seems as if comedian Sacha Baron Cohen is mocking Kazakhstan. He is not. He’s mocking you. After all, you’re the idiot who doesn’t know where Kazakhstan is or if it’s the kind of place where, as Borat claims, there’s a “Running of the Jews.” And more important, you’re the idiot who believes so much in cultural relativism that you’ll nod politely when a guy tells you that in his country they keep developmentally disabled people in cages. Or, worse yet, you’re the person who tells him it’s not a bad idea.”

As the former host of the “Ali G Show”, which spent years mocking Britons, he’s earned the benefit of the doubt that his humor is only pretending to be meatheaded. In one scene, he asks a gun shop owner from the American South, “What kind of a gun would you recommend to kill a Jew?”. The shop owner responded as if nothing were out of the ordinary about the question. It is scenes like these that have led some to denote his humor as “brilliant satire”, in which Borat’s disarming ways trick people into letting their hair down and being themselves. On the other hand, as explained in Borat The Meaningless (AV Club), it’s not clear that the “gun seller knew what he was being asked, any more than he’d know what it meant if Borat had asked him, ‘Ahomosayswhat?’” This is a good point: Americans, especially those in rural areas, aren’t exposed to other languages or even light accents. A heavy, faked, Kazakhstani accent is likely to engender nods and smiles as you try to help the smiling man with the camera on his way and out of your life.

Even if some of the scenes—and the dark underbelly they reveal—are enhanced by convenient cutaways, there are surely others that needed no such help. One article mentions a “rodeo dude who goes along eagerly with Borat’s anti-gay remarks … and the RV full of drunken frat guys who run down minorities and women with undisguised malice”, while another describes a scene where Borat “driv[es a] crowd into a frenzy with anti-Iraqi, pro-war cheers”. There are some nasty, introverted, hateful specimens out there—especially if you know where to look. Bush didn’t elect himself (the second time anyway). Examining comedy for why it makes you laugh is a good exercise—especially when the humor is as biting as this. And it’s clear that he’s put a lot of work into his backstory, as evidenced in this interview he did with MTV, Borat Speaks.

“In Kazakh elections, for example, the winner is not the man with the most votes, but the candidate who can carry a woman against her will for the furthest distance. Our present leader can manage 4.3 miles; how long can Premier Bush?”

It’s ludicrous, off-the-wall … and funny as hell. This kind of stuff harks back to the days of Monty Python and their silly, though also occasionally politically on-the-mark, humor and is a welcome respite from the spate of rom-coms surely already on their way for this long, dark winter.