Borat forever

Victor "Friend of this Blog" Morton is a lucky man. Not only is he at the Toronto Film Festival today, but he is almost certainly going to run into the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen masquerading as his ingenious character Borat, the Kazakh TV personality. For the uninitiated, Borat is a Kazakh TV journalist who is cheerfully, shockingly crude and anti-Semitic, but who affects such wide-eyed naivete that the marks for Cohen's satire inevitably want to please him. Cohen is in Toronto as Borat promoting his forthcoming film "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan", which a New York friend who has seen an early screening, assures me is one of the funniest movies ever made. I'm a huge Borat fan, so I can't wait.

Today's NYT has a piece on one controversial aspect of the movie, and in turn of the Borat shtick: it's anti-anti-Semitism. Cohen, who is Jewish, plays Borat as an avuncular Jew-hater, and thus tackles anti-Semitism by making ironic fun of it. Take this clip from HBO for example. Here's Borat at a honky-tonk, singing what he convinces the audience is a Kazakh country song, titled "Throw the Jew Down the Well." The audience really gets into it. It's insanely funny.

Is Cohen drawing out and exposing the anti-Semitism of these country people? Perhaps. But the real genius of Borat is how he exposes people's slavish desire to conform. I think he could have stood there pretending to be an equally clueless and eager-beaver Israeli Jew, and convinced the crowd to sing along to "Throw the Muslims Down the Well," or something similar. Maybe it's an American thing, I dunno, but if you watch enough Borat on HBO, you see over and over that the people he interviews are so eager to please, so desperate to make the nice but offensive foreigner feel comfortable, that they make fools of themselves.

Case in point: in one of the earlier episodes (which air on "Da Ali G. Show"), Borat visits high-society Charleston, ostensibly to show his Kazakh TV audience about Southern traditions. He goes to a fancy dinner party among all the well-bred Charlestonians, and starts talking crudely about sex. And then he farts at the table. It's hilarious to watch the well-off Charlestonians squirming at all this, trying very hard not to embarrass their guest (a polite Southerner is brought up to consider it his or her duty to prevent a guest from feeling uncomfortable). They ought to have thrown him out, but they didn't, they just took it, and played along unaware that they were being had. (I couldn't find a clip, but if somebody does, let me know and I'll post it).

This is how Cohen works in all his characters. Here is a screamingly funny clip in which Cohen, disguised as "Bruno," a gay Austrian TV fashion reporter, exposes the utter idiocy of New York fashionistas. It leaves you with the sense not that these are bad people (though they might be), but that they are so desperately eager to please, to conform to the expectations of their interviewer, that they'll say anything.

I do think it's telling that Cohen, as a Jew, has the cultural confidence to make humor out of anti-Semitism. I don't think any other people do that, certainly not so well. Can you imagine a Christian comedian having such nerve? A Muslim comedian? (For that matter, can you imagine Christian or Muslim comedians? Funny ones, I mean.)