While I assumed Borat would be hilarious, it wasn’t extremely high on my priority list (what comedy is?). Still, I knew I wanted to see it if for no other reason than to stay current in what has become one of the largest culture conversations in our country.
Yes, the film is funny—side-splittingly, belly-achingly so. Borat is destined to become the most hotly debated (and beloved) comedy in ages. But if you can watch it with a clean conscience, without any guilt, without turning away once in a while, then you are a bigger person than I.
Cohen, sporting an unwashed gray suit and a fluffy mustache, and speaking through a butchered excuse for English, disappears into the part of Borat, a TV reporter from Kazakhstan sent to America to do a series of reports on what makes our country work. Along the way, he meets a cornucopia of the America public, from driving instructors, rodeo organizers, feminists, Southern aristocrats, Pentecostal preachers and frat boys. Duped into thinking they are helping a third-world journalist learn about American culture, Cohen turns the tables on his condescending interviewees, feigning ignorance until their prejudices and bigotry are revealed. No aspect of intolerance, hypocrisy, arrogance or stupidity is overlooked.
Some consider Cohen’s brilliant skewerings unfair ensnarement. I don’t. Gullibility isn’t the same thing as entrapment. His guerilla ambushes didn’t force anyone to say anything they didn’t want to say. He simply gave them an opportunity to spew what was already boiling inside of them. By pretending to be an ignorant, racist, misogynist, gay-bashing, Jew-hating, gun-loving, warmongering bigot, Cohen elicited the same from those Americans he interviewed. Lynching gays, bringing back slavery, killing all Muslims—there is more than one occasion in Borat that the laugher ceases on account of all the gasps.
Cohen doesn’t allow you to laugh your head off. Indeed, even the zaniest of his jokes is meant to start in your belly but end up in your head. Those who leave the theater having merely laughed have missed the point. If Borat makes you laugh, Cohen makes you to think.
Borat holds up a savage mirror to American culture that could not have been made at any other time. Not only would its outrageous topics have been censored, but our celebrity culture now more than ever lives to preen in front of the camera. They’ll take their 15-minutes of fame any way they can, even if it means being recorded on digital video as monsters.
America, you got punk’d and the result is horrifying. Borat paints a picture of the American landscape that would induce nightmares were you not laughing so hard.
Borat, from its highbrow to its lowbrow humor, is a satire disguised as a gross-out comedy. Cohen is the ancient court jester speaking truth—even rude truth—to power. He is fully aware that comedy allows you to comment on things drama would never touch, to face things you would otherwise never know existed, and to ingest it all in such a way that we can laugh at ourselves even while being genuinely repulsed.
Part improviser, part brilliant comedian, and part courageous political satirist, how Cohen does it with a straight face is beyond me.
© Copyright 2006 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
