Oct 27, 2006 - Toronto Star By: Peter Howell

Why it's okay to laugh at Borat


For people who didn't get the joke, the offer of a nice warm cup of horse urine outside Mann's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood Monday night was something less than a friendly gesture.

Especially when stern peasant women pulling a wooden cart were proffering it, assisted by urchins dressed as coal miners. Has poverty in America gotten this bad?

Those who did get the joke laughed heartily and accepted the "urine" - which I presume was really apple cider. Wa-wa-wee-wa!

The clued-in bystanders understood that they were watching a stunt outside the premiere of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, a movie with comedic intentions that are more outrageous than its title.

It's subversive satire from Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian and provocateur best known on these shores, at least until the Borat phenomenon, as the knuckleheaded rap star of TV's Da Ali G Show. His fictional character Borat purports to be a journalist from the state- run Kazahk TV network.

In the movie, which opens Nov. 3, Borat goes on a tour of America and discovers to his astonishment that it's a land where Jews are treated with respect, women are allowed to vote (but horses can't), rape and prostitution are considered social evils and you're not supposed to "make toilet" in the street.

Borat is racist, homophobic, misogynistic, violently anti-Semitic and just plain ignorant. He's also hilarious, and here I admit to liberal guilt. As much as Borat made me laugh, it also made me uncomfortable.

Especially the anti-Semitic humour, which to me occasionally strays beyond satire into genuine offence - and I'm not sure if Cohen being Jewish himself makes it all okay. Borat sings a folk song called "Throw the Jew Down the Well." He loves his fictional town's annual tradition called "The Running of the Jew," in which schoolchildren pummel a giant horned Semitic head.

What really disturbed me was watching the reaction of some of the Americans in the film, who don't realize that Borat is a put-on. They rejoice in his hatred of the Jews and his contempt for women.

Am I as clueless as those people who wouldn't drink their horse urine? Maybe. Borat doesn't seem to be offending all that many people, with the exception of the very serious government of the real Eurasian nation of Kazakhstan, which took out a four-page ad in the New York Times proclaiming Kazakh virtues.

"Comedy is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable," said Mark Breslin, the founder and owner of the Yuk Yuk's comedy club chain.

"It's only because there's been so much weak comedy over the years that people think that's what comedy really is. But if you scratch it deep enough, the court jester was the one who came and told the king things that no one else could say."

Breslin lined up to see Borat when it screened to raves at last month's Toronto International Film Festival.

"I laughed start to finish. Belly laughs. And that's hard for me, because I've seen a lot of comedy. I thought it was brilliant. The only thing that I had difficulty with is strictly that it was one joke, and at the end of the 82 minutes that joke has been exhausted. But mercifully, the movie knows when to end."

But what if people watching Borat don't realize it's all a con?

"I can't imagine anybody watching that movie and then thinking, 'Oh, yeah, anti-Semitism, what a great idea!' Breslin insisted.

"Because remember, when you make a point as a comedian, you're only as valid as the character who's expressing the point of view. And it's clear that Borat is a silly and ironic character. You can't take anything he says as truth. The audience is smart; the audience knows these things - except if the audience is really stupid. And if the audience is really stupid, they're unlikely to go to the movie."

He pointed out that comedians at least as far back as Lenny Bruce in the 1960s have transgressed good taste and social norms to expose hidden prejudices. To mock hatred is to weaken its capacity to injure.

Len Rudner of the Canadian Jewish Congress goes back even further in his qualified defence of Borat.

"Satire has been around forever," said Rudner, who is the CJC's national director of community relations. "It came right after the first pie in the face."

Rudner hasn't seen Borat yet, and he may just wait for the DVD, "but like everyone else in the universe, I have seen the clip of Borat singing, 'Throw the Jew Down the Well.' As you can imagine in this job, we see a lot of strange stuff."

He doesn't take Borat seriously, which may seem surprising for the representative of an organization that often investigates hate crimes against Jews. He hasn't detected any deep rumblings of discontent within the community about Cohen's humour.

"Based on the number of telephone calls I have received complaining about Borat, and that number is zero, everybody seems to be getting the joke," Rudner said.

"I think we have to stand back and look at it in a broader context. I would like to think that most people understand the difference between the satire of a Sacha Baron Cohen and the serious and deliberately intended anti-Semitism of someone like (Holocaust denier) Ernst Zundel. I don't think anybody has ever gone to one of the premier anti-Semitic websites and come away from it saying, 'Come on, you guys, take it easy! It's only a joke!' I think people instinctively know when something is a joke and when it isn't."

This is not to say, Rudner added, that words and jokes don't have the capacity to seriously hurt people. That old nursery rhyme about how "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me," isn't true at all. His work often takes him to schools to counsel children who have been bullied and taunted by anti-Semitic and ethnic slurs.

"Words have a tremendous ability to hurt," he said. "I think all of us have to give consideration to the words we use.

"And both speakers of and listeners to satire have an obligation to think about it. Where is this coming from? What does this mean? Can I divine the intent in any way? Do I take it seriously?"

We'll find out next Friday when Borat is finally unleashed upon the movie-going masses. But there are already signs that movie studio Fox is hedging its bets.

The original plan was to give Borat a wide opening, on 2,000 screens across North America. That has been cut to 800 because a research study showed that only 27 per cent of moviegoers were aware of Borat, which implies the joke isn't getting through to the hinterland. The plan now is to expand the movie to 2,200 screens if the opening weekend goes well.

Should everybody just shut up, drink their horse urine and go see Borat?

Only if they remember to think as well as to laugh.



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