Posted on 12/27/2006 8:36:11 AM PST by Quilla
Let's talk about Borat. I finally caught up with it at my local theater here in Rancho Mirage not long ago. It made me laugh a few times, but basically I hated it. Here's why.
1.) The auteur and star of the movie, Sacha Baron Cohen, is a Jew of high degree in England and now in Hollywood. But much of the movie is viciously anti-Semitic. This includes not just some but many "jokes" about killing Jews, about how Jews are the devil, about how Jews will kill for money, about how Jews are like cockroaches (the last a direct steal from Joachim Goebbels, who compared Jews with breeding rats and insects). This is in a world where we just lived through an anti-Semitic holocaust with the same themes and another is promised by the terrorists in Iran.
These are not funny jokes. These are really just old-fashioned sickening racism disguised as hipness. It's also a smug joke by Sacha Cohen which is basically his endlessly saying, "I hate Jews, too, even though I'm Jewish, and hey, I guess I don't look Jewish because I can say all these horrible Jew hatred things and no one says, 'Hey, what are you doing? You're a Jew.'"
It's repulsive.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Mr. Stein is one of my favorites to read. He truly missed on this one.
>>A lot people forget how funny the Nazis and the Holocaust really are.<<
Obviously those people need to see "The Producers".
I don't judge Ben Stein's sense of humor on his entertainment industry career. The guy's a well published author and has made numerous public apperances. In these apperances he speaks as an author, attorney, economist, political pundit, actor, producer, etc. His sense of humor shines through quite often. The guy can be wickedly and intelligently funny.
Such people likely don't think ANYTHING is funny.
However, it is a bit hard to see how making those who perpetrated such brutality look like idiots would upset holocaust survivors.
Nazis certainly did not appreciate the mocking Mel Brooks gave them in the Producers or see it as a vehicle to gain more adherents. Someone once said that any person or idea can gain influence by being criticized but none can survive being laughed at.
No doubt many were upset at Gulliver's Travels too.
OK. But Richards remarks weren't funny. Now if Richard Pryor or Chris Rock had lit into the hecklers no doubt it would have been hilarious.
I haven't watched that show but if he is a faux conservative then I would agree.
I saw the movie ... it's the crudest thing I've ever set eyes on, and I hate myself for what I'm about to say, but through most of it I was absolutely convulsed with laughter. It's just Mel Brooks, Monty Python, etc., taken to an enormous extreme without any "governor," so to speak, on how far they will go to lampoon and shock.
"Nazi"-humor is usually puerile and banal, it understates the true horror of that regime.
Right... Creative editing. I don't think you've seen the scenes in question...
That's the cool thing about South Park. Underneath the low humor is usually some very valid social commentary. The movie South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut was probably one of the most socially relevant films of 1999 while absolutely being the crudest.
What about his old game show "Win Ben Stein's Money" that was on Comedy Central for a few years? His sidekick/Vanna White counterpart on that show was none other than Jimmy Kimmel.
He's from Kazakhstan who is a real country. The people of which are none too happy about Borat.
They even asked Bush to stop Borat.
Of course, I am even subject to the same kind of emotion. My wife passed away at 43 and I tear up to this day when thinking how proud she would be of her sons when they achieve laudatory things or bring home a girl friend she would have liked. Good things can bring up bad memories yet we do not demand no more good things.
However, humor mocking the pretensions of the Nazis is not "nazi humor" it is actually anti-Nazi humor. Fortunately, our humorists are not restricted to that which will not upset anyone. Most humor has a degree of cruelty to it in any case and if one is upset at that which is cruel to his enemy there in not much I can say. One of humor's most important functions is to deflect the evil away through twisting it and turning it against itself.
That isn't true anymore. After seeing the increased tourism as a result the country has actually invited Cohen to visit.
Stripped of its veneer of political incorrectness it's the same old same old attack on "bigotry" which in practice turns out to be any continued existence of anything that makes the West distinctive. It's not for nothing that this guy isn't being pilloried by the left.
Some people have no sense of humor. They think they do, but they don't. My sister being one.
Somebody send Ben Stein a clue
"so they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt" (Jack Benny's finest movie)
I Saw Borat the other night, and left thinking that yes, indeed, they had excised the scene in the Tucson C&W Bar where the audience joins him in singing "THrow the Jew Down the Well". When I came home I did a little googling and found out that that scene was never in the movie to begin with: it was featured on TV under the auspices of THE ALI G SHOW which also included segments with Bruno, the Austrian gay reporter, and Borat, the Kazahkstan reporter. The three drunken frat boys did, however, sue in
order to get their scene removed, but as you know, they were not successful. They claimed, probably truthfully that they were encouraged to get good and drunk before the cameras rolled. There were some other scenes cut out of the film, which might show up on the DVD when it comes out:
I read of one where Borat is on the set of a porn movie and refuses to have sex with the girl because she has no hair on her "vagheeeen".
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