I finally saw “Borat” the other day, and there was something about it that bugged me about it for quite some time afterward. It took me a while to figure out what it was.
It made me wonder because throughout much of the film I simply wasn’t laughing. I winced a few times (particularly during the scene where the naked Borat is wrestling with his equally naked, staggeringly obese producer). I loved the sequence where a TV weatherman desperately tries not to break down laughing when Borat, after participating in an achingly embarrassing on-camera interview elsewhere in the studio, keeps wandering into the middle of the weather report while searching for an exit.
Most of the time I just watched it. Others around me were howling, but I felt disconnected from it, as if I was missing something. And I didn’t know what.
After giving it some thought, now I think I do. And it stems from the following realization:
Andy Kaufman did this first, and better.
Although the film has a nominal narrative through-line (Borat trying to get to California to wed his spontaneous dream girl, Pamela Anderson), most of the film’s humor derives from ambush humor. That is to say, people have Borat sprung on them, and their filmed reactions provide the film’s humorous core.
There’s nothing new in this. Alan Funt was doing it with “Candid Camera” and “Candid Microphone” before that. Ashton Kutcher does it on “Punk’d.”
The aspect of it being a foreigner who puts people ill at ease made me think of Kaufman, and how right he got the same basic concept. Think of his quintessential “foreign man” routine, in which he stood before a crowd who, in his pre-“Taxi” days, didn’t know him from a hole in the wall. In his odd little voice and bizarre accent, he would do a series of impressions, one worse than the next, and all with little-to-no difference, one from the other. The humor came from the audience not knowing how to react: To laugh or cry or just feel embarrassment because this foreign guy’s act was just so ghastly. The longer it would go, the more convinced people became that this wasn’t a put-on, but instead just the worst comedy act ever. After each terrible impression the foreign man would say, “T’ank you veddy much.” His closer would be, “the Mister Elvis Presley.” The audience’s moan would be gargantuan as they braced themselves for this hideous performer’s butchering of the King. Whereupon Kaufman would launch into the best impression of Elvis, ever, blow the audience away, snap back into the foreign man and say, “T’ank you veddy much.”
The payoff wasn’t simply the Elvis impression. It was the self-realizing laughter that the audience had been “had” by a master comic mind. The pay off was the subjects of the hosing coming to understand how they’d been messed with, and also laughing at how uncomfortable they’d felt when, in fact, they’d been played.
There’s no payoff in “Borat.” Not to any of the sequences. Because Sasha Baron Cohen and his people didn’t play fair, as Kaufman did, as Funt did. There’s no “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!”, no “T’ank you veddy much.” No one who was victimized on “Candid Camera” ever wound up on TV against their will. They had to sign releases after the fact. Everything was above board. Here, the producers cheated. Most participants were told that this was being done for a documentary that was being shown only in Kazihkstan (however it is you spell it) and would never be seen in the US. To all intents and purposes, they believed they were “off the record.” They signed the releases under fradulent circumstances and only discovered long after the fact that they were unwilling stars in an American comedy. There’s never a moment when Baron Cohen drops character and people find out they were fooled, and laugh at their own credulousness. We laugh at their foolishness, but they never get to, and consequently we, or at least I, wind up feeling sorry for them.
Much has been made of the gun store owner who, when asked by Borat “What would be the best weapon to kill a Jew?” gives recommendations without batting an eye. But when I watched the sequence, Borat’s accent was so thick that he could have been saying, “the best weapon to kill you,” i.e., the general “you” meaning a person. That may not have been the case, but still, it’s a possibility.
I probably wouldn’t have these concerns if I’d gone into the film without knowing its history or the reactions of the people involved (a suckered Romanian village, for instance, wherein various citizens were characterized without their knowledge as rapists or violent). I don’t mind people being held up for ridicule, as in “Candid Camera.” But I mind it when they’re being lied to about it, and set up for someone else’s benefit and aggrandizement. The only ones I have no sympathy for is the aforementioned news broadcast where they had Borat on as a genuine Kazahk journalist, and thus looked like idiots for doing so. They’re a dámņ news program; why was their research department asleep in checking Borat’s credentials? They deserved to be ridiculed, with or without their knowledge and consent.
But most of the people in the film didn’t.
Which just makes the film a ninety minute exercise in cruelty.
Sasha Cohen’s reported excuse/rationale is that he wanted to expose the dark underbelly of anti-Semitism in the United States because such attitudes could lead to the Holocaust. Well, y’know what? Considering the massive and intense anti-Semitism that’s rife in France, in Germany, in the Middle East (where they hold Holocaust cartoon competitions and Holocaust denial conventions) and even in Baron Cohen’s own England, I somehow have to believe that if the world faces the prospect of another Holocaust, the US isn’t going to be at the forefront of it. He didn’t really pick the US because he thought the Holocaust might happen here, in this country, one of the only consistent allies that Israel has ever had. He did it because we’re a big target and an easy target. Which is fine. But he shouldn’t be claiming there’s anything to his choice of targets other than just that we’re an easy one.
Just as his subjects were. Easy targets.
It’s easy to make people look stupid…especially when their single greatest mistake is trusting someone and trying to react to them with the best hospitality they can muster.
I’ll take trust over deception any day.
PAD
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The grossly inaccurate portrayal of Kazakhstan that’s receiving the kind of criticism you are describing isn’t relevant to the quote you are disputing.
If you saw the movie, you would know the Kazakhstan scenes would only clue-in Borat’s marks if they saw it.
Bill, I think it is true that many (but not all) Americans are more likely to be duped by somebody who claims to come from an obscure foreign nation than Europeans.
If Sasha Baron Cohen wanted to dupe Europeans with a character they associate with being backwardss and bigoted, the best way for him to do it would have been to assume a Texan accent, and where a wide hat.
If a Khazachi came to a European town, the locals would have reacted with suspicion, and would not have accepted him at face value (partly because they would have thought he was an illegal alien looking for a job). But if a Texan came in, behaving badly, and making racist comments, this would have fit perfectly well with their concepts.
(Israelis are easily duped too, by the way).
I mean… Why did you even bothered buying a ticket? Now they`re going to make a sequel.
I’ll agree that, from what I see, Borat is a second-generation copy of Andy Kaufman (who I’ve never been able to warm to, and thus I’m even less interested in the copycats).
But since Peter brought up Allen Funt…I haven’t been able to laugh at a CANDID CAMERA rerun in years, nor any of that long-dead show’s imitators. Here’s why.
Anyone remember Seattle in the early ’70s? The era of “Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights?” Several solid years of recession and huge unemployment. One of those unemployed was my best friend’s father, Johnny. Johnny was an ironworker (still is, officially – just got his 50-year pin from the union a year or so ago), and the recession meant dámņ little building was going on in the Emerald City. Being divorced and sole support of both his kids, Johnny was looking for work every day – building jobs if any came up at the hall, odd maintenance and repair jobs wherever he could, ANYthing that’d put food on the table. (He usually managed, barely, though what he made frequently didn’t stretch beyond basic sustenance for him and his children, never mind such luxuries as heating the house.)
So one day, there’s an ad in the “Help Wanted”s of the P-I. Office work – no secretarial skills, just fetch-and-carry, move boxes and furniture, your basic office boy with some heavy lifting. Not listed as a temp job, and no work at the hall that week, so Johnny was first in line at the address given when 9 AM hit.
The office manager liked him, thought he’d do fine for the position, hired him on the spot at a low but acceptable wage – and they had work needing to be done immediately, so into an inner office with instructions to move THIS pile of boxes THERE and THIS filing cabinet to THAT office over THERE and so forth, and we’ll leave you alone to get on with the work…
So the boxes collapsed as soon as he touched them and the file cabinet drawers started mysteriously opening and weird phone calls started coming in and all kinds of other crap, and Johnny didn’t know what the hëll was going on but kept plugging away at the work he thought he was being paid for. He was, and is still, a quiet and undemonstrative man; didn’t get visibly mad or wigged-out, just dealt with the weirdness as best as he could and kept doing his job.
Well, he WASN’T doing his job. They didn’t even bother sending Funt in to do the “Smile!” BS; they already knew the footage was going in the wastebasket. Just sent in somebody to explain to the unentertaining and still-unemployed ironworker with two kids to feed that there was no permanent job, we just bring people in to do funny things for this TV show, here’s a day’s pay at the wage we agreed and would you mind leaving by the back stairs so you don’t give the gag away to the other suckers who have later interview appointments? Thanks, bye.
Johnny didn’t tell his kids about that one-day office job for years. When he finally did, he said the only reason he accepted the money was that groceries were short and he’d already wasted half the day – not much chance of another job cropping up, so he took the check. It had only cost him a day that could have been spent finding a real job, cost him the hope of a small but steady income for his family, and cost him no little of his dignity.
So I don’t miss CANDID CAMERA, even though I used to laugh at it when I was a kid. And I can’t see an episode without wondering how many little people’s little lives they messed with for a half-hour’s yocks. And I couldn’t sit through BORAT without thinking the same thing – and I don’t mean the drunken fratboys, screw’em. I mean people like the TV producer who quit or was fired over letting Baron Cohen fool her into letting him into the studio, just for starters – and I can’t help wondering how many people had encounters with the weird Kazakh guy that _didn’t_ make it into the final cut. I suppose they can take consolation in the fact that they apparently didn’t make big enough áššëš of themselves to be worth including. Just like Johnny didn’t.
No thanks. Kaufman was too weird for my taste, but his shtick didn’t give me the creeps the way this kind of thing does.
Don Hilliard
If putting people out of work indirectly disqualified people from starting businesses, I don’t think anyone would start a business. There are the businesses that render other businesses obsolete, businesses in competition with other businesses, and businesses that depend on the services of the first two. We all accept income from these businesses.
PAD:
“massive and intense anti-semitism that’s rife in … England”
Well…I got the impression from Tom Dalyell, long-standing MP who accused Tony Blair of being under the influence of “a Jewish cabal.” And from the Professor at University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology who fired two assistants because they were Israeli, and she “deplores the Jewish state.” Or the Oxford professor who rejected a Ph.D. candidate specifically because he’s Israeli. Or the grand tradition of British literature that has the most vile villains specifically depicted as Jews.
I’m not saying everyone in England hates Jews. All I’m saying is that if Sacha Baron Cohen is interested in turning the blazing light of his satire on anti-Semitism, there seems to be plenty of fodder in his own back yard.”
Ummm… Sorry, but “No”.
Tam Dalyell really only opens his mouth these days so he can change feet. His remarks were made in 2003 and greeted by pretty much total condemnation in all the British press. He stands down as an MP next year and will probably spend his twilight years extracting sunlight from cucumbers.
Mona Baker at UMIST “sacked two Israeli academics from the board of a small private journal” in 2002 after “Israeli troops issued closure orders to two academic institutions, the Hebron University and Palestinian Polytechnic University, also in Hebron.”
After 10 minutes Googling I can’t find the Oxford case at all.
Villains in literature… After seeing various US blockbuster movies with British vilains, let’s just not go there.
We have racists, we have bigots, we have sectarianism, we have all the usual leading brands of idiots. We also have a popuation of 60 million or so. “Massive and intense anti-Semitism?” That we just don’t have.
I’d suggest that Sasha Baron Cohen made a movie in the US, about the US, because that earned him a @@@@load more money than he was going to get making a TV series in the UK.
Personally, I just don’t think he’s funny. At all. Ever. (Then again, I think ‘Little Britain’ is rubbish, so what do I know). Maybe it’s an age thing, but I’d sooner laugh with people than at people.
FWIW, this is what was just said about Borat in a “Review of 2006 movies” article today:
“If you can overlook the film’s crudity, cruelty and over-eagerness to sneer, this was terrific entertainment”
Okaaaay… Still not making my ‘must see’ list then. I think I’ll stick with the bear baiting instead.
Cheers.