Borat

I just saw the most gut-bustingly hilarious movie I’ve seen in YEARS. And I have no idea how a good chunk of my friends will react to it.

The film in question is “Borat,” which opened this past weekend and drew an amazingly large audience on an amazingly small number of screens. Word of mouth has now made this THE film to see, and the showing I attended was pretty full for a Wednesday evening.

As stated, I thought the movie was amazingly funny. I literally had to start hoping the film would be a little more low-key toward the end, as it was beginning to actually hurt to laugh that long and consistently for such an extended period of time.

The film is also the most cheerfully over-the-top and offensive film that has been seen in years. There are few buttons it does not dare to push, and those it doesn’t push it mashes with a hammer. When, a mere three minutes into the movie, we are cutting to footage of Kazakhstan’s “annual Running of the Jew,” you begin to get an idea of what you’re in for.

There is no sacred cow in sight. The film’s lead character, Borat, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, is a Kazakh journalist sent to America to make a film about learning American culture. There is a bare-bones basic plot involved (he sees Pamela Anderson on TV and becomes obsessed with marrying her), but the majority of the film is simply situations depicting Borat meeting Americans, learning little, understanding less, and sharing his incredibly wrong-headed and prejudicial nature.

The film is made documentary-style, with much footage apparently shot just by dropping Cohen among folks who have no idea he’s playing a character, and seeing how they react. Some are more telling than those captured on film ever would realize. When Borat visits a rodeo, he meets a gentleman who insists that he should shave his moustache so he doesn’t “look like a Muslim,” then engages in a rant more jaw-droppingly wrong-headed and utterly racist than any writer would ever dream of trying to get away with. When Borat enters a gun shop and asks for a weapon for “shooting Jews,” the salesperson thinks for a second, then suggests a .45 or other effective weapons.

Borat is, as you can tell, horribly anti-Semitic, but his hatred is the uninformed rambling of someone who has been told to hate Jews and does, just because. He has no understanding of Jewish culture or people. When he stops at a bed and breakfast and is greeted by an older Jewish couple (the man even wearing a yarmulke), he doesn’t even realize their religion until they tell him - and only then does his prejudice kick in to ludicrous levels. He also is sexist, insisting to a group of veteran feminists that Kazakh scientists have proved that women’s brains are much smaller than men’s. Again, his misunderstanding and blissful ignorance is the whole joke - he has never in his life tried to understand other people, and when confronted with evidence that would undermine his beliefs, it goes in one ear and out the other, allowing him to continue believing what he wants to believe.

But does the film go so far that its satirical and subversive message is unreadable? I didn’t think so, as my loud and incredibly frequent laughter testified. Others may not have the same reaction. I saw the film with Abby Bollenbacher, one of my best friends and one of the smartest people I know, and her response to much of the material was a kind of stony silence. There were laughs, certainly, but often she seemed to feel the jokes were so over-the-top that they stopped being subversive and started just being offensive for offensiveness’ sake.

This may be an appropriate reaction to the film, for her and for many others. Borat certainly learns no great lesson over the course of the film, there’s no magical redemption and change of heart. He finds “Mr. Jesus” at one point, but that only leads to him modifying his prejudices to fit his new “Christian” lifestyle. There may, indeed, be those who see the film and laugh not because they find the commentary about prejudice and ignorance funny, but because they think the prejudicial material itself funny.

But that kind of danger is present in all forms of satire, and the same question always comes up in response - must comedy writers try to curtail their efforts because some might not get the joke? I’ve gone through a similar bout of self-analysis recently with my song “Gay Marriage,” which compared to “Borat” belongs on “Sesame Street.” I didn’t know if I had taken the joke just far enough that the satirical aspect was still funny, without being so far that it felt like I was just flat-out preaching. But then if I didn’t go far enough, would people think I was serious? I actually asked for a LOT of advice and feedback on that one before posting it, worried about how it would be perceived.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the writer and lead actor of “Borat,” has decided to swing for the fences, and for that he certainly must be applauded. He holds nothing back and tries for it all. Watching the heedless nature with which Cohen went for ANY joke, no matter how amazingly offensive it was, reminded me of a famous Mel Brooks quote: Upon seeing “The Producers,” a woman came to Brooks and proclaimed that the film was vulgar. “Lady,” Brooks replied, “it rose below vulgarity.”

“Borat” has much the same feel. It heads in directions few would have the guts to try and makes blunt the kind of satirical point other films would tip-toe around. Whether or not the film succeeds in delivering its basic comic message to each and every audience member is, of course, up to the comic tastes of each and every audience member. We all have a different idea of what’s funny - that’s one of the most wonderful things about having a sense of humor in the first place.

Another quote comes to mind, from the television series “Duckman”: “Dare to be challenged! To be offended! Dare to be treated as thinking, reasoning adults!” You may come out of “Borat” thinking you’ve seen the single funniest film produced in the last ten years. You may come out mortified and disgusted. You may come out somewhere in between. But I can promise you this: You will certainly have an opinion. You will be effected, and you will have been engaged, fully, by the movie in question. And that’s something that you CERTAINLY can’t say about 99% of the cr*p that calls itself “comedy” these days.