I haven’t seen the movie, but given that you can’t open a newspaper or magazine or turn on a television set or radio or computer without seeing stupid Sacha Baron Goddamn Cohen doing his goddamn Borat act, I have seen enough of Borat to not want to see another second of him, and to suspect that the film is like one of those Saturday Night Live acts that stops being funny after the first 10 seconds, but ends up getting made into a movie and that you have to hear every stupid jackass in the country doing an impersonation of for the next year.
Isn’t Borat just a lukewarm microwaved leftover of Andy Kaufman’s “Foreign Guy” schtick, which got old after about half a season of Taxi? Ha ha: those zany foreigners talk funny. Even the confrontational “media hacking” aspect of Borat, and the fact that Cohen’s doing all his media appearances in character are both ripped straight out of the Kaufman playbook.
Actually, that Dig article nails what I think is worst about Borat:
With each declaration that we’re entering “sexy good time,” the sharp satire in the movie gets duller and duller. Soon the racism in the movie isn’t funny because it exposes people’s prejudice, it’s funny because “throwing the Jews down the well” is catchy song and a Jew disposal method that maybe we should start considering more seriously.
It’s another example of the inherent limitations of satire: at the same time you are poking holes in something, you are also validating its existence. As Peter Cook said about his Establishment Club in the 60’s, it’s modeled on “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”. And when asked to explain why he stopped doing satire, satirist par exellence Tom Lehrer said, “The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be.”