Is Leftist Joke, Yes?
This entry was posted on 11/9/2006 9:05 PM and is filed under Film,Comedy.
11/10/06: Borat (2006)It’s not depression that has us farming out today’s entry (as made possible via
Ed Driscoll). We’re just lazy, and Michael Graham does a fine job of summing up
why Borat is inherently a right-wing film. The movie’s recurring gag is that Americans are so painfully polite that we’ll put up with any kind of crap. The fictitious Kazakhstan correspondent is sweetly appalling as he travels America and tests the patience of tolerant types.
Of course,
some people just end up looking like jerks.
Let’s not pretend, however, that Sacha Baron Cohen is on a conservative mission. This comedy succeeds despite itself, just as Cohen’s creation did on the small screen. We remember watching Borat Sagdiyev as part of HBO’s
Da Ali G Show, as the reporter took the stage at a country and western nightclub in Arizona. The anti-Semitic character sang his country’s popular folk song about throwing the Jew down the well. The audience—clad in cowboy finery—laughed and applauded and sang along.
The footage was shot as if Cohen thought he was revealing something about American prejudice. That’s why we were grateful not to be part of the live audience. We’ve got our Jew-loving credentials firmly in place, but we still would’ve been howling at Borat’s anti-Semitic tune. Prejudice is funny. It’s even funnier in the context of some foreigner showing his prejudices from the stage of a club where the biggest political issue is who leads the line dancing.
(In that same spirit, we were glad that news cameras weren’t on us when the O.J. verdict was announced. We would’ve been caught laughing like maniacs—but, you know, not in celebration.)
So we recommend
Borat, but not the small-screen Borat who proceeded it. The whole phenomenon is kind of confusing. It’s like how we admire the feminist who (as seen in
the film’s trailer) storms out on the sexist creep. Let’s give Linda Stein some credit for having a sense of outrage. We’re pretty sure she would’ve done the same if she’d been chatting with an imam.
Make it your own: Finally, playing in a theater near you.
