Crass Clown

The joke's on us: Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) gets a lesson from an American humour coach in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. (Twentieth Century Fox)

If you must see the sort-of-documentary Borat — and you must — wear a turtleneck, maybe even a cowl neck. At the very least, have a scarf on hand, as it will help to have somewhere soft to bury your face and hide from the horror. Here is a film that is part genius, part doofus and achingly funny. About halfway through, I felt like I had used up my yearly laugh quota and had to invent a new kind of laugh, a pained no-no-no-please-stop camel-wheeze that I kept repeating into my collar like a spell to ward off the next joke.

I love this movie.

Cringe entertainment — in clinical terms, laughing at the self-induced humiliations of characters who are unaware of the excruciating impropriety of their behaviour — was pioneered on Seinfeld and perfected on Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office(s). Borat, not incidentally directed by Seinfeld writer and Curb Your Enthusiasm director Larry Charles, catapults the cringe into a new hemisphere. Is it offensive? Yes, but only to everyone. At heart, however, Borat maintains some old-fashioned liberal values about tolerance and kindness, though it’s hard to say whether anyone will be able to discern their shape through the carnage.

Borat is the creation of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, the poker-faced genius behind HBO’s Da Ali G Show. This particular alter ego — and he hasn’t broken character for months now — is a Kazakh reporter who lives in a Fourth World mud pit of a village where his neighbours include “the town mechanic and abortionist.” Borat French-kisses his prostitute sister and lords his clock radio over his covetous neighbour, one of many stone-faced, potato-fed peasants wearing America envy on his cheap, synthetic sleeves. Naturally, the Kazakhstan government chooses representative citizen Borat to go to America on a documentary fact-finding mission, hence the film’s full title: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.  

Turns out that Kazakhstan is a real place, and the government there is not too happy about Baron Cohen tarnishing its image. But the film is all the more powerful because it doesn’t take place in Imaginarystan. If the humour is the muck that flies in the wake of Borat’s collisions with the real world — while Baron Cohen is always in character, the people he interviews believe they are participating in a documentary — then he must stay in the real world, too, or the edifice crumbles. The vague “over there”- ness of the very word Kazakhstan shoves the viewer’s own geopolitical ignorance into the light: “Kazakhstan? Sounds familiar. Is that in Iraq? Must Google when finished watching YouTube…”

Night 1 in America, Borat discovers Pamela Anderson on TV, and, like many before him, sets off for California in search of his blonde treasure, hoping for some “sexy time.” Huck Finn-ish — emphasis on  -ish — he travels cross-country in an ice cream truck, and while one presumes carefully cruel editing, it’s still fascinating to watch the range of reactions Borat elicits as people live up to (and, less often, live down to) their geographical stereotypes. In New York, Borat’s touchy-kissy greetings cause colourful swearing and violent threats; one man literally sprints off screaming through a Manhattan crowd with his arms chicken-flapping while Borat chases after him. In the Midwest, a tolerant driving instructor politely informs his incredulous student that yes, in America, women are allowed to drive. In Texas, Borat is enlisted to sing the American national anthem at a rodeo and his pre-song banter gets the crowd cheering: “We support your war of terror!” But when he warbles the lyrics of the Kazakh national anthem to the tune of The Star Spangled Banner — “Kazakhstan is the greatest country in the world” — the crowd turns ugly. It’s a burly, hairy, tobacco-chewin’ stadium and you almost fear for Baron Cohen’s safety (insert face in scarf) until the entire bizarre episode is halted by a horse in the background, perhaps deeply offended, bucking and falling to the ground.

How little is too much?: Borat takes a dip in a local river in Kazakhstan. (Mark Schwartzbard/Twentieth Century Fox)

The many “Did-that-just-happen?” moments of unscripted weirdness are the glory of the real world setup. But unlike Jay Leno with his Tonight Show forays into the street to guffaw at the average Joe’s ignorance, or Rick Mercer on the ditto-that Talking With Americans, Baron Cohen humiliates himself, too (and his targets don’t feel as easy). He appears in a man-thong generously described as unflattering, and engages in a nude wrestling match with his obese producer that is one of the most agonizing, hilarious, unyielding bits of comedy ever made. I was hovering about an inch above my seat, ready to leave the theatre.

I love this movie.

Borat is a film about how foreigners see westerners — promiscuous, greedy, materialist hypocrites — and how the West sees foreigners: horny, incomprehensible, primitive curiosities. And so it is a film about how everybody is wrong, but also how much there is to laugh at in the cutting shards of truth that create those stereotypes. All of which accounts for just how hard it is to watch.

There has been a good deal of envelope pushing in the past gross-out decade with movies like American Pie and Jackass, but diarrhea is easy. Showing just how close to the surface prejudice lies — Q: How many beers before a trailer of South Carolina frat boys start mourning the end of slavery? A: Less than you think — is truly radical, and maybe even inflammatory. Baron Cohen is Jewish, and his anti-Semitic jokes make his most ruthless material. In the Kazakh “Running of the Jew” ritual, citizens chase a giant Jewish puppet through village streets, smashing “Mrs. Jew’s egg” with bats. The grotesque puppet is like a living Nazi propaganda cartoon and Borat proudly guides the viewer through the delights of this national tradition with the joy of a little boy showing Grandma his Christmas presents. A few critics have grumbled that Baron Cohen’s scattershot approach wimpishly misses the Muslim community, but the anti-Semitic gags actually speak volumes about Muslim-Jewish relations; the film feels more topical, and braver, than Death of a President. An added wink: as Borat so casually and cheerfully spews his anti-Semitism (the assumption that everyone is on side is a truth of racism), Baron Cohen is actually speaking a combination of Hebrew and gibberish.

Borat invents a new kind of comedy rhythm, stretching the beats into distressing infinity, but the film still feels carefully hewn. On Da Ali G Show, the Borat character is purely reprehensible; on film, he is almost likeable — almost. The big joke of Borat is that the noble savage foreigner can actually be a pig. But in that idea resides a plea — or maybe more of a murmur — for some new kind of understanding of the immigrant as a full-fledged person, one who might even be capable of great ugliness. The outsider isn’t who you think he is, neither a virtuous exotic nor a stinky Other. It can’t be an accident that those who come off best in Borat are a gang of African-American young men in the projects who teach Borat how to wear his underwear above the belt, and a kindly Jewish couple who make a late-night offering of sandwiches (which Borat assumes are poisoned). More vicious and more ridiculed are the Southern socialites who live on Secession Row — really — and literally storm out when Borat invites a black prostitute to dinner; it doesn’t take a magnifying glass to read that subtext.

The question, of course, is whether or not the Borat movie simply affirms anti-woman-Jew-gay-whatever attitudes or if it flushes them out to vanquish them. That’s a tough question, but one that isn’t served by pulling the film from many of the theatres where it was set to play, which is what Fox suddenly did a few weeks ago. Borat expects a lot of the audience, but in a film overrun with fools, those who don’t even listen to the joke are the biggest fools of all.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan opens November 3.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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