Introductions at a new school can be awkward. Anxious to find friends, students ask nervous and often contrived questions about each other’s families, backgrounds and interests. But when Kazakhstan native Roman Nurpeissov arrived at the University of Michigan in September to start law school, nearly everyone he met was dying to ask him the same question: “Oh man, have you… return to article
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Reader Comments (4)Page 1 of 1 pagesI find it scary that you think that most wouldn’t get the irony.
I don’t know what I find to be a weirder conceit....
That the American media is considered to be so clever, or that the American public is considered to be so stupid?
In the mean time, Ali G/Borat/Cohen is one of the funniest and most provocative comedians I’ve seen in a long time
Posted by minerva_jones on Nov 2, 2006 at 11:48 PM Go and see the movie. I laughed so hard my side actually hurts.
Posted by texasindependent on Nov 3, 2006 at 9:03 PM As someone from the “old country”, reading review after review from the New York Times and the Washington Post, to Alternet and In these Times praising the intellectual perspicacity of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat has been truly exasperating. When I moved to Texas from India as a high school freshman 17 years ago, some of the same openly racist, stupidly unoriginal taunts I was subject to by my white peers is what is now being hailed as Baron Cohen’s “impressive satire” and “intense commitment to the character” by Adam Doster here in his review.
You name it: carrying a chicken around in a suitcase, defecating in public, the gutted jalopy pulled around by a horse, people so poor that they are intensely stupid, misogynist, sexually crazed, etc.- I have heard it all many times over in reference to me and those of “my ilk” and it’s all there in Borat. How such derivative, ancient stereotypes can be seen as penetrating satire is beyond me. As one of only 2 “coloreds” watching the movie in a crowded theater with an otherwise completely white audience (which was apparently immensely enjoying the show), the experience - to paraphrase Congressman Charlie Rangel (referring to our President) “shatter(ed)” for me “the myth of white supremacy once and for all.”
It has been a rite of passage for American immigrant groups (Italians, Irish, Arabs, Cubans, Indians, etc.) to disavow their origins in the old country in the process of becoming “white” Americans. The sights, smells, (lack of) fashion and poverty of their native lands are all easy targets of their ridicule as they assimilate. Among the culturally less informed, racist attitudes towards African Americans, the perennial American Others, are all too common. Given that it is no longer polite to express anti-black sentiments in public, this disavowal finds easier targets particularly among white people who happen to be poor - another group duly skewered by Baron Cohen.
I have noted with bewilderment how quick supposedly enlightened white liberals are to refer derisively to their poorer brethren as “white trash.” In the same vein, the liberal intolerance of Christian fundamentalists (while to some extent understandable given the Republican trumpeting of “moral values") is often unmistakably tinged with the same prejudice and condescension. Mr Baron Cohen panders to the worst of these sentiments in a scene where a broken hearted Borat “receives Christ” while responding to an altar call in a Pentecostal church.
Perhaps the most contrived moment in the movie comes during the hero’s final moments of tenderness with an overweight black woman - a prostitute, who is nevertheless more “noble” than any of the other poor or otherwise uncultured whites he encounters. The audience is rewarded for their momentary magnanimity with the final scene when the happy hooker becomes Borat’s wife and moves in with him (and his live-in cow) in Kazakhstan. The unstated patronizing message of course being that, even as stupid as the “white trash” may be, even they would not be so dense as to choose to leave American comfort to live in such unimaginable squalor.
Sure, Borat is side-splittingly, riotously funny - if you are not on the receiving end of its humor. Lynchings in the deep South were likewise once famously considered family entertainment for which you turned up in your Sunday best, kids in tow. Borat, along with Amos N Andy, Birth of a Nation, and the Indiana Jones movies, continues the glorious American tradition of having a good ol’ time at the expense of the culturally/racially other. Many thanks to our “liberal media” for spreading the word.
Posted by TexMacaca on Nov 7, 2006 at 12:10 AM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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Posted by David in Canada on Nov 13, 2006 at 2:29 PM Also by Adam Doster
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