The 'Borat' Show
PODHORETZ, JOHN
The 'Borat' Show The man who would be Kazakhstan's man of the moment. by John Podhoretz A cheap-looking and extremely strange movie with an even stranger title—Borat: Cultural Learnings of America...
...The wrestling is wild, violent, cartoonish—and both men are naked...
...The character, which debuted on Cohen's Ali G show on HBO, first came to prominence with Borat appearing at an open-mike night at a redneck bar, singing a catchy little ditty he had composed called "Throw the Jew Down the Well...
...Evangelical Christian tent shows are savaged...
...The genius of Borat is that it works on you in all sorts of different ways...
...Talking heads will try to dissect it on chat shows...
...The Third World is savaged...
...by John Podhoretz A cheap-looking and extremely strange movie with an even stranger title—Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan—is opening in a few weeks, and it will make a sensation...
...Political correctness is savaged...
...This is one of the four or five funniest movies ever made...
...He's a character invented and portrayed by the British comic actor Sacha Baron John Podhoretz is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...He's cheerful, friendly, and outgoing...
...They believe there is an actual Borat Sagdiyev and that they are being filmed for his documentary...
...Cohen's mother is Israeli...
...Already, several months before its release, two rather dissimilar institutions— the government of Kazakhstan and the Anti-Defamation League—have issued statements of concern about Borat's potential to do harm...
...Cohen refused to sugar-coat his portrait of this global idiocy by offering an audience stand-in to tell Borat it's not nice to say the Jews caused 9/11...
...The answer to the central question is, of course, that Borat is a satire of anti-Semitism—a riposte and retort to it in every conceivable way...
...They wrestle in a hotel room, then in the hallway, then in the elevator, then through the lobby and into a ballroom where an actual, real-world convention is having its annual dinner...
...Columnists will write op-eds about it...
...But here again Cohen and his collaborators take things a step further...
...The comedy came not from Ali G's dense queries but from the reactions of the celebrities and politicians, who could not believe what they were hearing and yet had to stay cool and collected because they knew cameras were rolling...
...Frat boys are savaged...
...In one sense, it's a raunchy comedy in the tradition of Animal House whose highlight is a crazed and enraged wrestling match between Borat and his obese producer...
...But most of the people in the movie are everyday Americans who have no idea Borat is a fictional character being played by a British comedian...
...But he's as close as we're likely to come on the silver screen in 2006, and we're lucky to have him...
...The film's first director, Todd Phillips, quit halfway through because he was certain Borat needed a character who would argue with Borat and challenge his opinions...
...America is savaged...
...The sequence is a classic piece of slapstick—as indelible in its way as the Marx Brothers' stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera 70 years ago...
...The attitude that says political correctness is humorless twaddle is savaged...
...When Borat interacts with Americans, he presumes they believe what he believes...
...The movie follows Borat Sagdiyev, a news reporter for Kazakh television, as he journeys from his small village to the United States and travels around making a documentary intended to explain America to his countrymen...
...Sacha Baron Cohen is no Jonathan Swift, of course...
...In the movie, we learn that the highlight of the year in Borat's Kazakh village is a festival called "The Running of the Jew...
...Like Chico Marx, Cohen is an old-time dialect comedian, and Borat mines its title character's mangled English for everything it's worth...
...This movie is satire in its truest, most courageous, form...
...Feminists are savaged...
...He is also a crazed anti-Semite, racist, and misogynist— not because he's chosen to be these things but because everybody he has ever known shares the same prejudices...
...Borat and his producer come to America but refuse to fly across the country because they are afraid the Jews might be planning "to restage their attack of 9/11...
...And in the film's most headspinning scene, Borat books a room in a real bed-and-break-fast run by a Jewish family in Pennsylvania, and spends the night in a state of abject terror, sure the mild and lovely couple are planning to poison him, steal his money, and drain his blood...
...Borat isn't real...
...Most don't, and watching them react with growing horror and disbelief at Borat's grotesque beliefs is hilarious...
...The credited director is Larry Charles, who also helms most of the episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm...
...Which brings us to the central question about Borat: What are we to make of its title character's happy, chatty, and thoroughgoing Jew-hatred...
...When Cohen created Borat, he took this brilliant concept to a new level...
...If you listen carefully you will discover that when Borat speaks Kazakh, he is actually speaking a combination of Slavic-sounding nonsense and conversational Hebrew...
...Cohen...
...Oxen are gored right and left...
...They would agree, and then find themselves face to face with a tall white Rasta doofus asking them the dumbest questions ever devised...
...It's even more hilarious—and discomfiting, as true satire should be—when Borat finds secret allies in the American heartland...
...Cohen pioneered this form of kamikaze interviewing with his character Ali G. Cohen's producers would call up celebrities and politicians in Britain (and later here) and ask if they would be interviewed by a young journalist from the BBC or HBO...
...Ham-handed responses like those just play into the glorious and very tough-minded comic sensibility that animates Borat...
...For while Ali G is just a well-meaning idiot, Borat is something else entirely...
...When Jonathan Swift recommended cannibalizing children as a solution to the problem of Irish hunger in "A Modest Proposal," the greatest work of political satire in English, he did not explain that he was being facetious—and the humorless solons of his time screamed in horror...
Vol. 12 • October 2006 • No. 7
