Borat
Am I the only one who didn’t like “Borat?” You know, that wildly successful comedy that’s supposed to make you urinate on yourself because you laugh so hard. That’s what it said on the DVD box. So what happened to me? Everybody else seemed to enjoy it. One of my friends, a fellow who I usually associate with intelligence and an adult grasp of complexities, thought it was the funniest movie he’d ever seen. I worry about him now. So, is it just me? Do I have personal problems? Am I too PC? Do I just not have a sense of humor? Am I on drugs? Should I be? Bear with me for a while as I try to formulate my argument. Maybe it’ll make sense, and maybe you’ll have to call out the loony brigade. We’ll see how this goes…
In case you don’t know, Borat is a character created by Sacha Baron Cohen, a British born Jewish comedian, and a Cambridge graduate no less. I say “no less” because Cambridge is a class act, like Harvard only older. It’s not just your neighborhood community college. Anyway, in the movie the character Borat comes from Kazakhstan, but not just anywhere in Kazakhstan – he comes from a dirt poor village where nobody speaks English and everybody happily has sex with Borat’s sister, or any available barn animals. There’s a town rapist. People have donkies in their kitchens. Its kind of like an over-thinned gene pool, a brood group of morons. The trouble is, for me anyway, they are people of an officially hate-able nationality. You know – Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan - all those “-stan” countries that the US likes to mess around with. Its so much easier to mess with them when they’re inferior. You can laugh at them while you steal their oil. Uh-oh, I’m showing my PC. Sorry.
Anyway, that would all be well and good except that they weren’t actors and they weren’t Kazakh and they had no idea what Borat was up to. Nobody told them that they were going to be rapists and barn animal sexualizers. That came out later when Hollywood put stories around them so that we would all piss our pants. Now, my friend tells me to just lighten up about that, everybody knew it wasn’t real, it was too preposterous. And besides, they got paid. Yeah, but that’s not the point. Some people have a deep running morality that won’t allow for that sort of thing, even if it’s fake. And you really should ask them first. That was a mistake. Now the whole town is suing Borat.
Ha! There, I laughed. That felt better.
Now to get back to my friend who used to be smart… He likes the way Borat goes through the movie pretending to be a backward bumpkin from Kazakhstan making a documentary on the US and A. That’s the way he gets real people to do real things and expose themselves. Like the holy rollers in the church who talk in tongues and pray for him. Or the drunken frat kids who talk drunken frat talk. Well, yes, he does get them to do that, but so what? None of them do anything you haven’t seen before, and none of them are as stupid as Borat, the guy from the little village in Kazakhstan. That’s the through line. That’s the center of the whole movie – the incredibly racist, misogynist, stupid, fucked up, sexually egotistical, moron from the dirt poor mud streets of one of the “-stan” countries. And the really messed up thing about it is that Borat - Sacha Baron Cohen – isn’t from there at all. He’s Jewish. He’s from England. He graduated from Cambridge. So this is just the same tired old story – Mister Privilege making nasty fun of the people in the tenements.
This is where they tell me to “lighten up” again, I’m just not seeing the humor. But I am seeing it, I just don’t think its funny. I think its mean. When Redd Fox made fun of working class Black people you had to let it go because he was Black. He had that right. When Lilly Tomlin takes on women, well, she has that experience. But this guy? I want to ask him, why don’t you play a Jewish character? That would be funny, wouldn’t it? Some dumb guy from a backward, inbred Hebrew community out in the sticks somewhere where they all have sex with animals and nobody has any brains. That would be hilarious, wouldn’t it?
Anyway, I don’t mind being in a minority if it means that I don’t have to laugh at bad humor. I learned a long time ago that it takes guts and intelligence to aim at the powerful, to construct a humor that deflates class pomposity and reveals the tiny underbelly of the big thieves. Some of them are your bosses and landlords and they might get mad. But its cowardly and small to make fun of the powerless. They are your tenants and day laborers and all they can do is complain, while everybody pisses their pants laughing. But things are different if you’re the court jester. When you go to the king’s hall you want to have your comedy aimed in the right direction. You want the butt of those jokes to be in line with the Man’s agenda. That’s a kind of humor that panders, that’s the comedy of complicity. And that’s not funny.
But maybe I just need to lighten up.
In case you don’t know, Borat is a character created by Sacha Baron Cohen, a British born Jewish comedian, and a Cambridge graduate no less. I say “no less” because Cambridge is a class act, like Harvard only older. It’s not just your neighborhood community college. Anyway, in the movie the character Borat comes from Kazakhstan, but not just anywhere in Kazakhstan – he comes from a dirt poor village where nobody speaks English and everybody happily has sex with Borat’s sister, or any available barn animals. There’s a town rapist. People have donkies in their kitchens. Its kind of like an over-thinned gene pool, a brood group of morons. The trouble is, for me anyway, they are people of an officially hate-able nationality. You know – Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan - all those “-stan” countries that the US likes to mess around with. Its so much easier to mess with them when they’re inferior. You can laugh at them while you steal their oil. Uh-oh, I’m showing my PC. Sorry.
Anyway, that would all be well and good except that they weren’t actors and they weren’t Kazakh and they had no idea what Borat was up to. Nobody told them that they were going to be rapists and barn animal sexualizers. That came out later when Hollywood put stories around them so that we would all piss our pants. Now, my friend tells me to just lighten up about that, everybody knew it wasn’t real, it was too preposterous. And besides, they got paid. Yeah, but that’s not the point. Some people have a deep running morality that won’t allow for that sort of thing, even if it’s fake. And you really should ask them first. That was a mistake. Now the whole town is suing Borat.
Ha! There, I laughed. That felt better.
Now to get back to my friend who used to be smart… He likes the way Borat goes through the movie pretending to be a backward bumpkin from Kazakhstan making a documentary on the US and A. That’s the way he gets real people to do real things and expose themselves. Like the holy rollers in the church who talk in tongues and pray for him. Or the drunken frat kids who talk drunken frat talk. Well, yes, he does get them to do that, but so what? None of them do anything you haven’t seen before, and none of them are as stupid as Borat, the guy from the little village in Kazakhstan. That’s the through line. That’s the center of the whole movie – the incredibly racist, misogynist, stupid, fucked up, sexually egotistical, moron from the dirt poor mud streets of one of the “-stan” countries. And the really messed up thing about it is that Borat - Sacha Baron Cohen – isn’t from there at all. He’s Jewish. He’s from England. He graduated from Cambridge. So this is just the same tired old story – Mister Privilege making nasty fun of the people in the tenements.
This is where they tell me to “lighten up” again, I’m just not seeing the humor. But I am seeing it, I just don’t think its funny. I think its mean. When Redd Fox made fun of working class Black people you had to let it go because he was Black. He had that right. When Lilly Tomlin takes on women, well, she has that experience. But this guy? I want to ask him, why don’t you play a Jewish character? That would be funny, wouldn’t it? Some dumb guy from a backward, inbred Hebrew community out in the sticks somewhere where they all have sex with animals and nobody has any brains. That would be hilarious, wouldn’t it?
Anyway, I don’t mind being in a minority if it means that I don’t have to laugh at bad humor. I learned a long time ago that it takes guts and intelligence to aim at the powerful, to construct a humor that deflates class pomposity and reveals the tiny underbelly of the big thieves. Some of them are your bosses and landlords and they might get mad. But its cowardly and small to make fun of the powerless. They are your tenants and day laborers and all they can do is complain, while everybody pisses their pants laughing. But things are different if you’re the court jester. When you go to the king’s hall you want to have your comedy aimed in the right direction. You want the butt of those jokes to be in line with the Man’s agenda. That’s a kind of humor that panders, that’s the comedy of complicity. And that’s not funny.
But maybe I just need to lighten up.
posted by Jim Page at 12:37 PM
6 Comments:
You're not the only one who didn't like Borat.
I don't remember if it was the "Sueddeutschte Zeitung"-newspaper or the "Deutschlandfunk" governmental radio station (both in Germany) who criticized in the same way that you did.
Looks like I finally have to watch that movie to form a view on it...
Ullrich
I think you're missing the point. I haven't seen the film, though I know Cohen tends to dumb down the humour to appeal to a wider audience, so I'll base my assessment of the character of Borat purely on what I've seen in Da Ali G Show.
Borat is making fun of the powerful. He is a satire of white America. The middle class have this idea of what foreign people should be like, and Cohen takes that idea, dresses up like it, and exaggerates it to the point where it's totally ridiculous, but when he interviews people in character, they actually believe him. The things he says are completely absurd, yet people accept them as par for the course, because he's a foreigner. And foreigners are weird and backwards. Of course there's a town rapist. Of course everyone has sex with goats. Who knows what sort of crazy things they get up to over there? Right?
The whole act is poking fun at people's conceptions of foreigners. Geddit?
Yep. I'm with Finnegan. Borat is edgy and hysterical. Anyone who can get people to mime horns and "chant throw the jew down the well" while in character as something as absurd as Borat is a fucking genius.
Finnegan... Personally, I think you're missing my point. The character Borat is the through line, not the people he encounters. Not the frat boys or the antique dealer. They are diversions. Borat is the one we watch all the time. Borat is supposed to be from Kazakhstan, which is predominantly Islamic. Islam is an official enemy of the War On Terror. We get to laugh at the ridiculous stupid Islamic guy. We see him describe how his home country has raised the age of consent to 7, how women have smaller brains, etc, etc. As a citizen of a the lead country in the “war on terror” I refuse to participate.
And don't forget the villagers, the poor Romanian people of Glod. They were paid for their parts, of course, but they were not told really what those parts would be. Is your mother still alive? Would you like to see here portrayed as a town hooker "just for laughs?" Would it be okay because she signed a piece of paper and somebody paid her $100? Think about it.
There's an older disabled Indian man who walks through the Pike Market almost every day. He uses a crutch and he's going blind. Ask him if he thinks it okay for you to dress up in a head dress and feathers and face paint and pretend to be a drunken Indian for a movie. See what he does. See if he gets the joke.
No Jim, you're not alone. I think the whole concept is based around the exploitation of innocent people by a racist.
I'm not fussed if you come down on the side of PC or even Apple for that matter. The fact is this man has made a pile of cash from the subtle transference of his own racist humour onto people too dumb to know the difference with the idea of making people laugh who really ought to know better but think it's hip to buy into the “Borat is ironic” p.r. rubbish.
I'm English (although not Jewish - nor from Cambridge) and I'm ashamed that this puerile trash should be regarded as representative of the best we can offer the world of cinema.
KW-L
Jim Page ...Please do not "lighten up."
You're right on.
A sad day if we lost the likes of your "heaviness".
~Cherie
Post a Comment
<< Home