How was the guy qualifying things when he said his wife had been dead for ten years. Isn't Borat a widower himself? "My wife is a dead." is one of his catchphrases.

But he has a new one!

Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.

It all became clear when I realized that these were British tabloids. Going out and looking for a copy of the obviously fake Borat is a sign that you don't get the joke. But on the other hand, if they can make some money, apparently they don't mind.

But there was a CNN reporter in on it too, no? They're all a bunch of fucking fools:
"I must come off to these people as a bit like Borat myself. How fantastic is that!
-Brilliant.

You know what Borat's problem is? There is not enough hype for his movie.

Okay, okay, so I have a question. Serious question. Seriously. So obviously there's a strongly racist element to Borat. I mean, no matter what else you say, you cannot deny that Baron-Cohen has done something along the lines of inventing a stereotype in order to do what he does here. Does anyone have any thoughts on this, other than that I should shut up with my P.C. concerns, or that "it's a complex, layered joke." Because fine, it is, and I mean I'm not gonna lie, I'm going to go see the movie and I'm probably going to laugh my ass off. But is it really OK that Borat is actually "informing" people about Kazakhstan when they otherwise might not even know the country exists? Even if, in the final draw, the joke is on them (me? us?), is this really OK? Is there really any built-in redemption of its over-the-top cultural stereotyping (a crude stereotype that's almost just completely fabricated and pasted onto "Kazakhstan")?

Slate has a different article (one of THREE!; Slater, you're right on about the lack of publicity) that considers the racist aspect of the anti-semitism: http://www.slate.com/id/2152772/nav/tap1/

But that doesn't get into the ethnic Kazakh issues. I agree about the fact that he is, like it or not, informing people about Kazakhstan. However, in a weird way, it has also given Kazakhstan a platform that it hasn't had before: a meeting with the president, a full page ad in the NYT, etc etc. Our guilt at laughing at a country we know nothing about also kinda forces us to listen to the real story.

Almost certainly, the issues of anti-Roma racism and homophobia have roots in Kazakh culture just as redneck racism has roots here. Is mocking and parodying that hindering our ability to move past those stereotypes, or is it offering a platform to discuss and debate these issues, misguided as it may be?

I work for the ACLU for a reason, so this will come as no surprise. But at the end of it all, while the question is important and interesting, I will always come out in favor of allowing (OK, so no one's arguing the movie should be illegal, except see below) or even morally condoning this kind of speech. and here's why: German prosecutors have recently filed a legal complaint against Cohen for anti-Roma remarks (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20061103.NOTE03RVT-3/TP...)
- yowza. And in the absence of a First Amendment, they have also recently gone after a guy who sells anti-Nazi propaganda (seriously) because he sells buttons with a swastika and a line through it (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR200610...).

Anyhow, my point after this suuuuuuuuuuper long post (sorry), is that it's pretty hard to ascertain with certainty what someone's racial/political intentions are, or even what the societal results of race-based discussion, positive or negative, will be. Is Borat so far from the anti-swastika guy? Who knows? I don't know if I can say (although I believe in my heart that Cohen is more interested in exposing racism than propagating it).

But without MORE speech, you end up in a bizarre circumstance where Germany is suppressing all speech that even encompassess the idea of racism, regardless of its intent. And in local elections, Nazi candidates have consistently been receiving around 20% of the vote. So suppression of these ideas, based on the concept that YOU can identify which speech will be harmful, clearly just isn't working. I think it's more important that he brings up issues of race (and clearly they are blatant rather than subtle), which enables us to have a meaningful discussion about racism versus the Roma or the Kazakhs, even if we also talk about fermented horse urine.

Go Borat.

(goddamn parentheses.)
prosecutor v. borat :
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20061103.NOTE03RVT-3/TP...

prosecutor v. anti-nazi:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR200610...

you know, rereading that, i guess my diatribe was somewhat non-responsive, because borat's prosecution, or whatever it is, in Germany, may still reaffirm people's beliefs that Kazakhs hate Gypsies? maybe it's weirder than the antisemitism because he isn't from kazakhstan? like jeff foxworthy implies that american southerner are racist rednecks, but that doesn't offend me b/c jeff and i are both 'mercan? so, like, yeah the grafting thing is still an issue.

and yes, i do plan on continually responding to my own comments until the post count is 30.

Flea, I am a little skeptical about free speech being such a virtue that racism with comedic intent is "art" or showing us how the brilliant the auteur of such comedy is at exposing that racism still exists. So I guess I agree with Jesse, although it is important to note that the hype for Borat probably has created a scenerio where I will no longer be able to go see it and find it "brilliant." I'm probably more cued now to not be a sheep and like it. In other words, I will be looking for things I don't like about it. But, perhaps I should go in with more of an open mind.

On a different subject, I am excited that Idaho might actually elect a democratic governor and a democratic representative. If so, I believe the Republican stronghold in the West might be over and electoral politics will change in a positive way. Am I too naive? Will Idaho really change?

not sure free speech is always a virtue (i.e., KKK). but i do believe censorship is almost always a worse poison.

man, i hope you're not naive but realistically hopeful, Slater. but even if you're wrong about ID, Montana's heading that way too! even if the stronghold remains, I hope we'll still have it in us to be starry-eyed naifs next time around.

Racism and national-origin-ism are marginally different, and for some reason racism seems mildly worse.

This post has no real point.

Well in this case it's not really national-originism so much as ethnicism, which is just stupid semantics, so it is racism. Marginal differences in this case are no differences. I saw Borat last night. First off, while it obviously had its funny parts, I really wasn't that overwhelmed by the humor. It's overloaded, it's heavy-handed, it's funny in smaller, focused doses. Although the naked wrestling was a bit out of control, must admit.

But I in no way think the movie should be disallowed, fucking free speech by all means- but it surprises me that basically every critic feels like they can't just come out and say the character is racist because then they could be accused of "not getting it," they have to come up with some more complex reading of it, when in fact it IS racist, and the post-modern/ironic/self-referential/house-of-mirrors-ness might have some kind of layering effect, but it doesn't mean that anyone is redeemed. I see your point, flea, about dialogue/discussion, and all advertising is good advertising, and all that shit, but I guess I'm just a little cynical about how that's all going to work out. I'm not, for one thing, totally comfortable with SBC's playing with the stereotyped Muslim in order to draw out the antisemitism. I'm not sure SBC and I would see eye to eye on what's actually being demonstrated/accomplished there. Of course I'm not SUPPOSED to be comfortable with it, but then I'm META-not-comfortable-with-it, I don't know... I'm not trying to rustle up the PC agenda, I just don't know...

I was walking down the street about a week ago, and I heard this one guy saying to his friends, "I mean, isn't it ridiculous that the Kazakh gov't has nothing better to do than worry about the Borat movie." Food for my cynicism, right there.

I'm not sure if it's a problem in this situation.

In America we've had a somewhat poor history of portraying negative caricatures/stereotypes of ethnic groups that we were simultaneously suppressing through other cultural or legal mechanisms: minstrel shows during slavery-times, the Japanese character in Breakfast at Tiffany's or Bugs Bunny cartoons, portrayals of American Indians. Other countries have had similar issues (Germany's treatment of Jews in entertainment pre-WWII stands out).

Americans know NOTHING about Kazakhstan (the most anybody in the movie says was the pro-slavery frat guy referring to it as "old Russia", which was actually surprisingly accurate). I'm not entirely certain that negative caricatures of groups that we're not interested in suppressing locally is morally problematic. Even if we expand that stereotypes beyond Kazakhs to, say, Central Asians generally, I still don't think people are going to be particularly interested in keeping them down. We don't really even know who they are.

A movie about a British tourist acting as a moronic fish out of water, Mr. Bean for example, is not considered racist. We don't have any problems laughing at Brits because, hey, we don't have any problems with Brits generally. Picking apart their foibles is amusing to us. As long as you don't have an underlying hatred for the group we're laughing it, it's not necessarily problematic.

I don't think.

I'm not entirely clear that I'm right about this. I'm just wondering about it. How do we draw the line between laughing at Mr. Bean and laughing at Borat? (Assuming, of course, that anybody actually laughed at Mr. Bean.)

i'm still holding to the mock-yourself/others issue. rowan atkinson, foxworthy, and cohen as ali G are all characters that mock their own cultures. cohen via borat is knocking a culture he doesn't represent. i think in the context of the show, both ali g and bruno are in the context of one dude taking on several ridiculous characters, so it washes out. but the movie only shows one culture, and it's one cohen certainly has no ownership of. i think that ownership/belonging is something we need psychologically to make ourselves feel better, like the speaker's intentions are benign. like gays can say fag, and blacks nigger, but when others do it it usually makes us uncomfortable.

i know this is tangential at best, but there's justin timberlake song where he says a line, and then this black back-up singer just adds "nigger" at the end, over and over. it bothers me.

welllll, was thinking of ali g as british, but i naturally completely forgot that 'i is black.' i guess it's just his shtick - cohen figures orthodox parodies are so 1990s?

I'm basically with Flea on this. I'm also interested in how people think SBC's Bruno character figures in. It's not about race in that case, but he's still poking fun at a group he doesn't belong to (AFAIK).

Screw this, let's talk about the Tenacious D movie.

At the risk of taking this too far and sounding like I have no sense of humor: A large part of the premise that Borat is so superstitiously anti-semitic is that he's muslim and backwards, no? At the start of the movie it is made clear that he is muslim, as opposed to, say, Russian Orthodox. So it's certainly not a portrayal that in no way resonates with American audiences. And in the case of British or American comedians, they all get plenty of representation here, in a context in which they make perfect sense because it is their context. SBC also exists in that same broad context, but he's chosen as the source for his humor specifically a place that we know nothing about, that's entirely out of that context, and we know nothing about it because there's no real cultural exchange between our countries, and just let me know when there's a deal cut so that actual Kazakh people can somehow give us an actual alternative idea of what life in Kazakhstan is actually like. I haven't seen the Tenacious D movie, so I can't talk about it.

how's this for a simplistic take:

cohen goes out of his way to make his stereotype SO ridiculous and SO inappropriate and SO shockingly anti-semitic/sexist/etc., and yet the people with whom he interacts (americans, usually), completely accept him at face value -- meaning that they expect a kazakh to act that way, because they have no idea how one would actually act, because they are ignorant.

is that simple enough to be the satire? it's kind of what i always thought. so by being a racist caricature, he's exposing americans' (and others') low expectations of another culture.

imagine someone dressing up as a racist asian parody, with a fu-manchu and squinty eyes and walking around saying "ah-so-ah-so, velly velly solly" - and being treated with straight-faced discourse instead of a) shock or b) wild laughter.

Jesse - I only saw the movie the once, so I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that he explicitly said that he was not Muslim. At some point he said something about worshiping something, but I'm pretty it wasn't any standard or recognizable deity. Maybe it was when he was talking to the guy at the rodeo who wanted to hang gay people and thought the mustache made him look terroristic. I don't think he was Muslim.

I'm pretty sure that I, as an American with an American's sense of discomfort of black stereotypes, would have a bigger theoretical problem with Ali "Is it because I is black?" G than Borat's bizarro eastern european/central asian vibe. Flea thinks it's ownership, I think it's position in society. In my scenario its probably ok, in hers it's probably not. Oh well.

I'm not sure a Bruno movie would be particularly enjoyable. That character was only funny for getting frat guys to yell about how excited they were to be gay, and that can only last for like one second at a time, right?

When he's talking to the guy at the rodeo and the dude starts talking about killing muslims or whatever he says, I'm pretty sure Borat makes it clear to the camera that he is muslim.

I really wish I'd found this link before:
http://tonykaron.com/2006/11/03/sorry-sascha-but-borats-not-funny/
because I am basically willing to let it speak for me.

Does anybody remember? I could have sworn he said he worshiped something that wasn't identifiably Christian, Muslim or Jewish. Like, some guy's name. Maybe I misheard it. Anyone going to see it again?

Would anybody have had a problem with the character if he had come from a modern day Freedonia or some other fictionalized, non-specific country?

marco & I were discussing this last night. Not so much.
BUT, remember the origin of the show: it migth have been more difficult for people to believe that he was a real journalist if he came from a land "I didn't maaaaaake up." of course, that's overestimating our public school system and americans' grasp of geography. but still.

i really do think that in the context of the show, these issues were non-salient, because it was clear from an amalgam of all 3 characters that he was simply trying to expose prejudices, as jbg notes. but the movie, in focusing on another country, has no context and fairly raises all of jesse' concerns. My final analysis: it was a very, very bad idea to move his shtick into a single-character focus. Quite simply, Cohen sold out in a way that can no longer justify his sociological aims, the intelligence of which made the show watchable for me. Goddamn you, harpy Larry Charles!!!

I've traveled to both countries, and Robonia is better than Freedonia, btw.

The Ali G movie came out in England in 2001 I think. So if you think making a movie based on one character is selling out, he did that nearly at the beginning of his career.

But I still haven't seen Borat, so I'm not sure where I fall yet in this discussion.

i really like jokes.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/468318p-394114c.html

I actually do remember Borat explicitly saying something like "No no, we worship the big goat." It never actually occurred to me that he might be Muslim, though it's not an unreasonable thing to think.

jbg's take was also the take of the person who reviewed Borat for the LA Times, for what it's worth.

The Tenacious D thing was a joke; it's not out yet.

Borat says he worships the "hawk". I didn't really think of him as Muslim, but from the movie I guess his village was something other than Christian in the beginning.

The movie is great, (I laughed my ass off) but what purpose do scripted scenes of Borat's anti-semitism serve? I am not certain. They don't highlight the anti-semitism of others. If they do anything of value they just show anti-semitism to be ridiculous.

As others have posted, I'm of the opinion that Cohen chose Kazakhstan so his country of origin could be real. (Where was Latka Gravas from? Is Perfect Strangers' Mepos real?) Note the character looks nothing like a Kazakh. He need to shoot the "Kazakhstan" scenes in Romania. He speaks gibberish and sometimes throws in Polish phrases.

Just as Americans are ignorant of Kazakhs isn't part of the joke that Borat is completely ignorant of those he hates, i.e. Jews and Gays? He goes to a Gay pride parade and engages in behaviour that could be easily viewed as homosexual and doesn't realize this. He meets a man who is wearing a yamurka (sp?) and has no idea he is Jewish.

Obviously the character exposes racism, anti-semitism, and homophobia, but doesn't he also expose that people will put up with some pretty ridiculous behavior just to be polite? Maybe the people he meets find it easy to believe that a Kazakh would be confused by a toilet or maybe they don't want to make waves.

CM and NYA told me about a guy they met at a dinner party who was into some crazy conspiracy theories. Not of the TruthBomb variety mind you. But he believed that GWB was actually of a race of lizard people. How did you guys react to this guy? Did you call him out as crazy or did you let it go and snicker behind his back?

At what point do we call out someone's racism? If someone says she wants to round up all the blacks and kill them, most likely we would say "what the fuck is wrong with you?". If an old relative says they avoid a certain part of town because it is a black area, we probably cringe at Aunt Ethel's prejudice, but say nothing.

Wasn't Latka from Caspiar?

Other Borat asides:

Did anyone see Richard Roeper mispronounce "Borat"? Very annoying.

Some review or article I read noted SBC "obviously fake moustache". I am no moustache expert, but isn't the thing real? Isn't SBC's whole thing about how none of the hair is fake and that is why he has to shoot all his different characters stuff around the same time?

My friend, who works in LA as a lawyer and grew up in Costa Rica as the daughter of a Canadian diplomat, didn't realize Kazakhstan is a real country.

That bodes well for me, what firm does she work at?

Eh, on second thought, you shouldn't post that online. If you're in a responding mood, you can get that to me through CrazyMonk if you don't know my email.

Didn't see if anyone had posted this. It's quite old but it's the only straight-up interview I've heard with SBC. It's with Robert Siegel on All Things Considered from 2004.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3613548