Borat Review

Comedy is tricky; one person's joke is another person's offense. While hilarious at times, all told, Borat is mostly offensive.

There were 3 very funny scenes that immediately spring to mind: kids running up to the ice cream truck then being scared away by the bear, the naked wrestling match (an instant classic!) and trying to stuff Pamela Anderson into the wedding sack. The rest of the laughs were mostly cheap shots derrived from stereotyping, and uneven stereotyping at that.

He took the safe route: negative stereotyping of southerners/whites/evangelicals/gunshop owners/patriots/cowboys (not to mention Kazakstan) or any combination thereof, neutral/slightly positive stereotyping of blacks, and excessive hyperbole (i.e. rendering the situation so outlandish as to be unbelievable) when taking jabs at Jews. Muslims? He knows he'd be a dead man walking if he mentioned them in any way, but he thought it okay to insult a preacher's wife at dinner, mock our national anthem at a rodeo, and show a Christ-impersonator being poked with a pitch fork. I would have had more respect for Mr. Cohen had he tried to do something like fake his way into a synagogue kitchen and start butchering a side of pork on the cheeseboard and filmed the reaction of the Rabbi. That's not so outlandish when compared to his other antics.

Mr. Cohen does Jews no service in this movie. The running of the Jews was funny, but only a Jew could get away with doing that. Only a Jew could get away with walking into a gun shop and try to buy a handgun and baiting the shop owner by saying, "it's for killing Jews", thereby making the gunshop owner appear complicit in Jew-killing because he didn't say anything to dissuade him (imagine the outrage if say, Mel Gibson made a scene in one of his movies like that). Only a Jew could get away with throwing money at salbugs and running away because those crafty Jews transformed themselves.

That's all fine really. Self-appropriating the most outlandish myths about a race/group and desensitizing them through comic-hyperbole goes a long way toward removing the venom, but I don't think it necessarily has a place in a movie like Borat.
Everybody gets humiliated except the Jews, and he papers over that with hyperbole which does Jews a disservice. That's why I would have respected him more for butchering a pig in a kosher kitchen, for example. He'd have held his own people to the same standard as those he mocks.

All in all I'm left feeling he's just a punk-ass taking comedy to a new low.