Posted on 11/16/2006 11:36:37 AM PST by SirJohnBarleycorn
In his only interview as himself, Sacha Baron Cohen talks about growing up kosher in London, inventing a new kind of comedy with Ali G and conquering Hollywood with Borat
(snip)
Since reaching star status in Britain in 1998 with his other alter ego, the wangsta jester Ali G, Baron Cohen has never done an interview in his home country as himself and has never done an interview this extensive anywhere.
(snip)
When Baron Cohen first heard that the Kazakh government was thinking of suing him and placing a full-page ad promoting the country in The New York Times, he was editing his movie in Los Angeles. His reaction: "I was surprised, because I always had faith in the audience that they would realize that this was a fictitious country and the mere purpose of it was to allow people to bring out their own prejudices. And the reason we chose Kazakhstan was because it was a country that no one had heard anything about, so we could essentially play on stereotypes they might have about this ex-Soviet backwater. The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist --who believe that there's a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to nine years old."
In actuality, it turns out that Borat is a far more damning critique of America than it is of Kazakhstan. The jokes that Baron Cohen mentions above -- and all the rest about beating gypsies, throwing Jews down wells, exporting pubic hair and making monkey porn -- are clearly parody. But the America that Borat discovers on his cross-country trek here -- rife with homophobia, xenophobia, racism, classism and anti-Semitism -- is all too real.
"I think part of the movie shows the absurdity of holding any form of racial prejudice, whether it's hatred of African-Americans or of Jews," Baron Cohen says.
(snip)
It soon becomes clear that he is not merely curious or vegetarian or allergic to peanuts. He keeps kosher and is making sure that there is no shellfish, pork or other forbidden food or food combination in the dish. A devout Jew, Baron Cohen also keeps the Sabbath when he can, which means that he doesn't work from Friday evening to Saturday evening.
Rife? So you go looking for these types of people, find them, and then conclude that America is "rife" with them? Isn't that like going to Utah and concluding that America is "rife" with Mormonism?
I believe you've nailed this condescending, arrogant secular jew's hide to the wall.
Nice job.
Or a critique of whatever scenes the movie-makers could cherry-pick to make the movie as funny as possible. One wonders what was left on the cutting-room floor because Americans behaved perfectly decently (as, frankly, they often did even in the scenes that made it into the movie when Borat put them in an impossible position).
Remember too that all these millions of people going to see the movie are Americans who are willing to laugh at themselves, a fairly rare quality.
See Cohen as Ali G make fun of some British treehuggers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ9o1KHi-mY
Sorry, have you seen his first movie? Entire movie devouted to utterly destroying the chav and hiphop culture (and various tauntings of the toff culture) in the UK.
Don't hold your breath, he's a left winger. Doesn't have the ba!!s to mock muslims.
I haven't seen the movie, yet, but caught him last week on Leno and he was a crack up. Haven't laughed so hard at Leno in a looong time. He had Borat on with Martha Stuart and she made a fool of herself...instead of laughing at the guy she came across as the uptight biddy that she is.
bttt
Here is a scene that did not make the final cut. He was trying to get a dog from a dog shelter so that he could use it to defend himself from jews...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph15ewarM3Q
She makes a career of teaching women to do things that reinforce their WOMANLINESS.
Just get the stick out of your butt and laugh, he really is very, very funny.
There will also be tens of millions of people in Europe, Asia and elsewhere who will see this movie and will have reinforced to them the same biased anti-American themes they hear constantly in their mainstream media.
I'm not sure people who haven't spent an extensive amount of time abroad interacting with local people really understand the image problem the United States has around the world, especially in Europe, and to what extent the entertainment industry is responsible for these ugly anti-American prejudices through movies, television programs, music, etc.
The frat boys were from Carowhina? BWAAAAAAAAAAAH! I may have to see it afterall. LOL.
If you weren't so quick to be an insulting a-hole you would have read in my comments that I concede that he is funny, in fact at times hilarious.
I used to listen to Howard Stern but realized the fact that he can at times be very funny doesn't excuse the degeneracy.
they;re from South Carolina actually.
He's found jackasses in Britain. The Cambridge segment is probably the best, or maybe the crew segment, but there's a few others.
You are probably right.
I have watched many of his vidoes on youtube, and many comments share that exact theme: haha, Americans are stupid, ignorant, bigoted etc. etc.
Spurlock is the idiot who ate McDonald's for 30 days and documented it.
If I really think hard, I can come up with about 5 people that I've known at some point in my life who were one or more of the above - and they were all major @ssholes. Somehow 5 out of the hundreds of people I've ever known isn't exactly "rife."
We should be self-confident enough to be able to laugh at ourselves from time to time. To me he seems kind of like the new Andy Kaufman.
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