Cultural Learnings

Saw the midnight show of “Borat” last night.

There’s an almost messianic fervor about this movie now. The Huffington Post has pre-hyped "Borat" so much, that some folks are scratching their heads:

“I wish to know why Borat deserves all the ads, pictures and articles here at Huffpo. I had never heard of him until I started being inundated with the above here. The overkill, the hype that reminds me of CBS and their touting of Couric as new anchor, have turned me off this guy completely. I guess I will never find out what makes him so fucking wonderful that the Huffpo has become ALL BORAT ALL THE TIME, because I am so turned off by the overkill here that I will not be seeing his movie. Please, give Borat a rest.

By: liberalfrombirth on October 30, 2006 at 10:35am

So why then is Borat’s first-coming being treated more like Jesus’s second?

It’s clear to me: In this climate, the politicians aren’t willing to take risks anymore. The only ones who dare to speak the Truth are the comedians: people like Chappelle, Colbert and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Yet it’s telling that Colbert and Cohen can only do that speaking behind their masks.

Colbert takes on the persona of the enemy in order to desecrate it: the rabid, thoughtless conservative talking-head.

Cohen, on the other hand, becomes the stereotypes that our enemies (and ourselves) secretly (or not-so-secretly) espouse in order to expose them: Bruno, the flaming Euro-fag. Ali G, the ignorant, illiterate ghetto bastard (as conservatives might see him) or the dumbed-down white wannabee wanksta (as p.c. progressives might).

And then there’s Borat, the anti-Semetic pseudo-Slav who manages to embody almost every backward, bigoted belief imaginable. There is a reason that the fictional Borat comes from non-fictional Kazakhstan: If America and Americans are the embodiment of civilization, sophistication and tolerance, then there must be some place that is the opposite of that. And Kazakhstan is on the opposite side of the world. It is, almost literally, the farthest place on Earth from us. Go any farther and you start coming back.

But the brilliance of Borat is that he destroys that conceit. Every time Borat gets an American to sing “Throw The Jew Down The Well,” or cheer at the suggestion that George Bush should “drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq,” he shows us who we really are.

We are him.

And that Kazakhs most likely do NOT harbor the sentiments of their counterfeit ambassador only makes Americans look worse.

Like Colbert’s comic incineration of Bush the Lesser at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Cohen’s road-trip through America in the person of Borat is one of the greatest, most fearless acts of patriotism I have ever witnessed. And Cohen’s not even American.

Sacha Baron Cohen does with comedy what I wish rappers would do with hip-hop: Take on the powerful and take no prisoners. “Borat” is scorched earth comedy, just like P.E. and N.W.A. used to be scorched earth music. Everyone who needed to be offended was.

“Borat,” like better hip-hop, becomes a Rorschach test for anyone who encounters it. If you’re a Jew and you’re offended by Borat’s anti-Semitism, the joke’s on you. If you’re a Jew, realize that Borat is just a character, and you’re still concerned about his impact among the goyim, the joke’s on you. If you’re one of the goyim and you’re laughing because you sympathize with Borat’s bigotry, the joke’s on you.

In the end, the only one left standing and smiling is Borat himself. Unlike most of us, he, at least, is on a journey to learn something.