Similar to a Penn lecture in which students suffer from coughing fits every few moments, the new film Borat generates the same reaction, with spasms of laughter in place of coughing. Actually, not so much laughter as squealing, by grown men whose voices haven't registered in such octaves since elementary school and who would have been embarrassed were their neighbors not laughing equally as hard. If the measure of a comedy is how often and how thoroughly it makes its audience laugh, then surely Borat is one of funniest films ever.
Sacha Baren Cohen again channels the chauvinistic, anti-Semitic Kazakhstani journalist Borat he made famous as a character on HBO's Da Ali G Show. True to form, Cohen unleashes Borat on unsuspecting civilians, who squirm politely through the awkwardness, or, in their worst moments of pride and ignorance, confirm Americans' worst fears about themselves. Viewers of Da Ali G Show will recognize the format, though the documentary sequences are strung together by acted bits that drive the goofy plot (about Borat's quest to find and assumedly deflower Pamela Anderson). One expects these acted portions to be some of the film's dryer bits, but they are often hilarious, including what must be the first MPAA-sanctioned scene of tea-bagging.
Much attention has been given to Kazakhstani officials' furor over Cohen's character (they went so far as to take out a four-page self-promotional ad in The New York Times). But America, not Kazakhstan, is the real victim of the film. When Borat visits a rodeo, one interviewee, mistaking Borat for a Muslim, tells him to "shave your mustache so maybe you look like an Italian." Later, two drunken college students call for the reinstitution of slavery. Viewers of Borat will leave the theater sore from laughter, but also embarrassed by the antics of their countrymen.
