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 ...
lighten up, nobody is saying that Schindlers List should be nominated for comedy of the year. Many people find this type of humor to their liking but it doesn't mean they endorse something like the holocaust. I think movies that break down the PC walls in this country and challenge those leftist principles through comedy, hilarious e.g. Southpark, The Family Guy, most Mel Brooks works, Da Ali G. Show, etc. etc. This doesn't mean I uphold the wholesale killing of any people regardless of comedy at their expense.
That's all it is. A shot at America and rural America in particular is all it is. The real joke is on the American people. I think the guy is a sleazy predator who uses camoflage to lull his victims into a false sense of comfort and then stabs them in the back for fun and profit.
He only manages to get some drunk college boys to make racist comments, though. The rest are Southerners who are too polite to tell him to his face what they think of his anti-semitic comments. Also, it is heavily edited. I'm sure there are a lot of bits on the cutting room floor where people told him exactly where to get off.
Making fun of rural rube "Jew haters". Why not go to California radical campus rallies and associate with those more politically minded Jew haters?
There is toile humor (Borat) and intellectual humor (Frazier). You are right. To each his own.
Ben Stein's a class act. If I want bathroom humor, I'll get it from a nasty little 7 year old brat who lives in our neighborhood.
The other reason its funny is what he's describing when he mentions Jews isn't even remotely Jewish (horned impish devils that lay eggs, transform into cockroaches, etc).
He's poking fun at how most Jew-haters know nothing about what their talking about.
Yes, Sacha Baron Cohen is playing a character that is a sort of backward guy from Eastern Europe who uses over-the-top stereotypes as a way to get reactions from real people. He then films those real people and the results could not have been scripted better.
He does the same thing with Ali G, his white British "ghetto" character who spouts Jamaican and rap-based jive, and Bruno, a gay Austrian fashion reporter.
It is actually very inventive and funny, and his character comedy is flawless.
I really like Ben Stein, but he really didn't get the style of comedy, or the point.
"The Camp Town Ladies?"
Frazier was the finest comedy ever, in my opinion.
Hit up myspace. He gets a bar full of cowboys to sing 'Throw the Jew down the well'. Mind you he also get's a dog pound keeper to kick him out after trying to train a dog to kill jews (he asks the lady to put her fingers up by her ears like horns and say shalom!) and then mentioning he indends to eat the dog once back in kazakhstan... The screen version is pretty tame compared with what he left out...
I don't like grapefruit juice.
Does that count?
Yes!
Like in Hogan's Heroes . . . one of the famous jokes, when talking about one of the Generals, went something like, "He may be a pain in the butt, but he did kill a lot of Jews, so you gotta like him."
It makes fun of the anti-semite, not the other way around.
Sometimes, perhaps more frequently that I'd like, Ben Stein COMPLETELY misses the point. He has with this movie..
Well, actually he just accurately showed how crazy the members of a certain Pentecostal church were. And they were indeed nuts (and not because they were Christian).
:-D
One or two, if memory serves!
I agree. I was watching a rerun yesterday where Daphne was berating the father for "having a wide dump".
After she left he looked at Frasier and said, "What was that about? The sands of time don't flow up the hourglas, you know?".
Lines like that were genius in their metaphor.
Exactly. Many are saying some just don't "get" Borat's humor.
What's not to "get"? I got that kind of young, trashy humor in high school.
The talented comedian is one who doesn't have to stoop to bathroom humor to get laughs.
I sorta agree with you, but I see Ben Stein's point, too. Growing up in Queens, I had lots of contact with people who lived through the War in Europe, both Jews and Gentiles. Neither group found anything funny about ideologies of mass murder, whether Nazi or Stalist.
Talk to a person who lost her parents and all her brothers and sisters, several aunts, uncles and cousins in the camps and see if they find Borat all that amusing.
You are so on point on this. Looking for anti-semitism in the red state christian is so last century. When there are real, deadly anti semitic attacks of racism carried out every day in this country. Today's anti semite is either a Muslim or a college leftist.
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