Refreshing Slapstick

Rating: 8/10 (31 March 2007)

"The Christians who "save" Borat...treat him pretty nicely...You may disagree with their views, but what else is there to laugh at? The views expressed by the people at that church, to my memory, aren't offensive or racist, they are sincere." - Jason Eaken
To the people who feel this way about Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), you missed the joke. This film is an American satire, or better worded, a satire about America that has been a long time coming. We deserve it. We need a good look at ourselves every once in a while. I am happy the majority of Americans understand this movie; in its opening weekend, it held the number one spot despite 20th Century allowing the movie to play in only half of the scheduled theaters, claiming that middle-America will not "get" Borat.
This film follows Borat's (Sacha Baron Cohen) journey from his mud-for-floors third-world village in Kazakhstan, where his most prized possession is a 15 year old cassette player, to the technologically, culturally, religiously, ethically advanced Unites States, where the phrase, "We don't do that here in America" becomes all too common. Borat's goal is to become Americanized so that he can bring the sophisticated culture back to Kazakhstan in hope that they too will become more civilized.
So for the middle-America that "got" the movie, you can stop reading here. If you think traveling across America to kidnap Pamela Anderson in a burlap sack is funny or if you were amused by Kazakhstan's annual "Running of the Jew", I would advise you to read something else. As for the people who continue: I hope I can clear up why this movie is funny, although I don't expect you to laugh, because I know jokes needing explanation just aren't funny.
This movie works because as an audience, we know nothing about Kazakhstan. Everything we know, we learned from Borat. The technology is dated, there is no indoor plumbing (plastic bags: yes; toilets: no), medicine has seen no advancement, and even if it had, the residents are more than likely too poor to afford a prosthetic limb, they are anti-Semitic and homophobic. Their culture is much worse off than the almighty American way of life, or is it?
There is a reason that you feel uneasy when you see Borat approaching a group of black teenagers in the middle of the night in an unknown location. We know the history of blacks and whites in America. This is surely a recipe for disaster. Why is it funny though? Maybe because we know that Borat has not exactly mastered the English language, and he is most likely going to say something that will be taken the wrong way. Or maybe it's funny because in the next scene, after the teenagers have Americanized Borat, he is calling a white man "vanilla-face" as if making his pants baggy has allowed him to supersede his own ethnicity to look down on someone with the same skin color as himself. Or maybe it's funny because Borat's ignorance of the prejudices in our society mirror the prejudices in his own society, say towards Jews and gays
And yes, Jason Eaken, the audience is indeed laughing at the views of the members in that church, but that is not the joke. We are not laughing because we think they are insensitive, offensive or racist, but because they are sincere: that is the joke. It is hard to imagine that those people actually believe what they are doing. You don't need to be anti-religious to understand that church members running up and down aisles with their hands in the air being moved by Holy Spirit is ridiculous. And you don't need to be an atheist to understand that allowing the Holy Spirit to then enter your body, which enables you to speak in tongues and heal foreigners of depression, is extremely ridiculous. These are the types of stories told after a group of preteens play with an Ouija board while watching The Sixth Sense. The funniest part of the church incident is Borat, who by the way in real life is a Jewish-actor, never misses a beat and goes along with the whole experience.
As one who finds slapstick comedy childish, stupid, crude, degrading and filled with cheap laughs, I would highly recommend this movie. It is extremely clever, it is offensive in a way that makes us embarrassed of how people view America, and it is funny. This is definitely the best comedy of 2006.