It is, a little. It's also a little embarrassing, because these are real people, not made-up characters.
This is a mockumentery...not real people. It is a movie. People said what Borat wanted them to say. People acted the way Borat wanted them to act.
Not necessarily. Read this. (an excerpt)
But as I told you yesterday, "Borat" also has its victims. One of them is Dharma Arthur, a 35-year-old television news producer who lost her job after Baron Cohen as Borat appeared live on her show in Jackson, Miss. Arthur is now working in Panama City, Fla. But her tale of how Borat wound up on WAPT, and the consequences, is an unhappy one. If it’s true — and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t — Baron Cohen needs to send her a check from his first weekend proceeds.
All Dharma Arthur wants, though, is an apology.
Like all the others who were spoofed and conned, Arthur tells me she got a call from a publicist in July 2005 from something called One America Productions. Their Web site checked out, and Arthur welcomed “a little blond guy who looked college age” to her studio. He said they were shooting a documentary called “America: Behind the Propaganda” to show foreigners that Americans weren’t “evil.”
She had never seen “Da Ali G Show” on HBO nor had she ever heard of Borat. “I don’t have cable. I have two mortgages,” she said.
But Arthur did a little research. Thinking Borat was Muslim, she greeted him with deference. “Women aren’t supposed to touch men in public, so I didn’t make physical contact,” she said. She put Borat on the air with anchor Brad McMullan, she said, “and then things went haywire.