Borat goes on US offensive (very)

The Sunday Times (U.K.) ^ | 08/06/06 | John Elliott

[WorkingClassFilth]

Celebrate diversity! Oh, and don't forget to thank the entertainment industry for their hard work...

[GadareneDemoniac]

Like many recent articles from formerly respectable British newspapers, this is inane and written in lower class slang.

I guess this article appeared in their version of the "Style" section of the paper.

[wildwood]

look what michael moore hath spawned.

[peyton randolph]

This guy can be forgiven a lot because of his funny performance in "Talladega Nights" as a French homo NASCAR driver.

[denydenydeny]

To me nothing is less entertaining than this sort of "comedy" from Cohen or the Jerky Boys where you take ordinary working people and you viciously and sadistically f*** with them for the enjoyment of the audience.

Celebrity-prank shows like Punk'd are one thing, but watching millionaires ridicule actual working people making $30K a year is about as funny as leukemia.

[Rodney King]

Borat rocks. I can't wait.

[dighton]

“Since the 2003 reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world. Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats and age of consent has been raised to 8 years old. Please, I invite you to come to Kazakhstan, where we have incredible natural resources, hard-working labor and some of the cleanest prostitutes in all of central Asia. Goodbye.”

[AZGunSlinger]

Come on. It IS funny. His satirical over the top style does in fact lampoon all kinds of cultural stereotypes. If we can't laugh at ourselves...who can we laugh at??

Borat is hilarious, and so is Ali G. I love how he ridicules the lame rap subculture that champions drugs, under-achieving and a total lack of morals.

[Zeroisanumber]

Might be funny, I'll have to check it out when it hits HBO.

[glorgau]

While Kazakhstan may be the butt of Borat’s jokes, his interviewees often come off even worse, lured into betraying extreme or idiotic views. In one scene Borat is at a rodeo discussing homosexuals with an older man in rancher-style clothes, and says: “They hang ’em in our country.” The man replies: “That’s what we’re trying to do here.”

I don't get the point of this paragraph.

[struwwelpeter]

Kazakhstan rocks!

[AZGunSlinger]

He gets the unwitting old man to basically say he's trying to hang gays.

[observer5]

"Celebrity-prank shows like Punk'd are one thing, but watching millionaires ridicule actual working people making $30K a year is about as funny as leukemia."

Well said, this is the decadence of the Hollyweird elite, pathetic

[Larry Lucido]

I don't know. Sam Kinison could pull this off and be hilarious. This guy doesn't do it for me.

[babble-on]

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2004/08/in_my_country_t_1.html


Heeeeeeeere's Borat!!!

[dighton]

Under enlightened Kazakh law, disputes about taste are settled by firing squad, not impalement as in old days.

;-)

[Jameison]

"much of it sees Baron Cohen, 34, mercilessly baiting luckless Americans who fail to twig that he and his film crew are actors"

Another British idiot?
I hope I come across this sucker here in New York.
He'll find out quickly enough who's really "luckless".

[Mount Athos]

The Ali G character is rarely funny to me, but Borat is often very funny!

He makes fun of jihadists, anti-semites, and the ordinary people who coddle them. Few people reading this article think he would be funny, but I bet 8/10 here would laugh out loud actually seeing it.

In one skit, he is doing an artsy shared dance experience with hippies in San Francisco -- a touchy-feely I'm OK, You're OK atmosphere. How OK is a jihadist bigot in their midst? Hilarity ensues, as the hippies get a wakeup call that not every ideology and culture is equally good.

Each participant is asked to do a simple crayon drawing expressing their feelings or an emotional time in their life. They take turns explaining their drawings as everyone in the room offers praise and validation of their feelings.

Then Borat's turn. He has drawn a picture of soldiers machine gunning crying villagers. The hippies offer condolescences -- "was that your village you grew up in, I'm so sorry".

He says emphatically with a straight face, something like -- "No this is the greatest day for my people, the proud victory of our soldiers over our enemies from the village of kazak"

Look on the hippies faces -- priceless.

In my opinion Borat isn't just humor, but a also an experiment to see how ordinary people react when confronted with evil ideologies. The show is interesting partly because you are curious how various types of people will react. Do they coddle it, ignore it, support it, confront it? Sometimes what happens is surprising.

[digger48]

neh-ver heard of 'im