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Trailer for "Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan"

If there’s anything harder than trying to explain a joke to someone who doesn’t get it, it’s trying to explain to yourself why you laughed at something that you suspect you shouldn’t have.

That’s the tone of a lot of reviews of Borat, which surprised the industry by topping the box office on a weekend that the family-friendly Santa Clause III was expected to own (and doing so on fewer than a quarter as many screens). Borat couldn’t be any less family-friendly, so let us for just a moment pretend that its success represents a victory for adult filmmaking rather than the result, like Daniel Ortega’s election, of a divided opposition (the family audience was split with the Aardman Studios animated film Flushed Away).

Borat Sagdiyev, for those of you over the age of 25, is the creation of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. A reporter from Kazakhstan whose primary attributes are anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia and a barely rudimentary grasp of the English language, Borat is a guise under which Cohen confronts the real world, interviewing people who don’t know they’re being put on.

Like the faux news reports on The Daily Show, the humor comes either from people’s astonished reactions to such an outlandish character, or from the unguarded things they can be lulled into saying to their “interviewer.” (Documentarians like Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore used a more subdued version of this tactic to put their subjects off-guard.)

Essentially a series of encounters staged on a trip across the United States tied together by the flimsiest of plots, Borat isn’t terribly different from Cohen’s HBO series Da Ali G. Show. If nothing else it proves that Cohen may be one of the bravest men working in the entertainment industry today. It takes a lot of nerve to stand in front of a rodeo audience in Virginia singing a version of “The Star Spangled Banner” with new lyrics glorifying another country. Even more dangerous is approaching strangers on the streets and subways of Manhattan with a “traditional Kazakh greeting”—a kiss on both cheeks.

And when it comes to going that extra mile for a laugh, I’d be hard-pressed to think of any professional performer who would do what Cohen does with his obese co-star Ken Davitian in a scene I couldn’t begin to describe.

What makes Borat truly uncomfortable (aside from the less successful moments, when you merely feel sorry for the person he has trapped on camera) is the critic’s fear over how viewers less enlightened than he or she will react. It’s one thing to say that Borat’s hysterical fear of Jews mines laughs as an exercise in satirical excess (as in the “Running of the Jews” sequence). But what, the educated critic frets, of those “unenlightened” viewers who don’t get the joke, who may be laughing with Borat rather than at him?

Underlying this fear, I suspect, is the impossibility of knowing how many layers there are to Cohen’s joke. There’s no question that the movie will appeal in “the wrong ways” to frat boys (of whom there were many at the screening I saw, all primed in advance to howl from beginning to end.) But I suspect that the discomfort this raises in liberal audiences is a large target of Cohen’s satire. Then again, what if he is luring us into making apologies for obnoxious behavior, daring us to stand up and call him on going over the line?

You can argue this ad infinitum, to ever-decreasing effect. Borat is often funny, and occasionally very funny indeed. Much has been made of Cohen’s abililty to think and improvise in character, but some of the film’s biggest laughs come from the slapstick uses to which he puts his tall, thin frame. But the movie is also lazily and sloppily conceived: More than a few segments are clearly staged, which the camerawork makes clear—the failure to acknowledge the presence in each scene of the cameraman recording this “documentary” is perhaps the biggest conceptual flaw. And Cohen’s claims to be showing up prejudice are undercut by the stereotyping of Borat as an ignorant foreigner from a land that condones rape, incest and bestiality (you can hardly blame the government of the real Kazakhstan for protesting the film).

Veterans of another British comic institution, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, have over the years voiced the suspicion that their American success was due more than anything else to the number of tit jokes the show featured. Of Borat, you can make what you will.