Why You Should Watch the Borat Movie

Why should you, a respectable grown family oriented adult, go to see the Borat movie?

The movie is really funny. As in laugh-out-loud-in-a-theater-while-you-usually-are-that-person-who-glares -at-loud-theater -laughers funny.

I happen to be one of those people who complains about funny movies such as 'Jackass', 'Clerks' or even the 'American Pie' series, claiming productions of this style only serve to further dumb down our already watered down and hopeless society. Yes, I am one of those boring self righteous whiners. And yes, I've seen all 3 American Pie movies.

The strange is, Borat is funny enough to be above all that. One goes to watch the movie knowing it will be stupid, but this is a different category of stupid. Most viewers are already familiar with the Borat character, Sascha Baron Cohen's third incarnation (the other two are the famous Ali G. and the flamboyantly gay Bruno). Borat is a reporter for Kazakhstan television, and he turns the country into a primitive, misogynist, anti-Semitic and terribly unhygienic land of the past.

A couple of people and organizations have feebly protested the obviously fake anti-Semitism, claiming some people may not be in on the joke, but, as New York Times critic Manohla Dargis so aptly put it, "…some people are definitely not in on the joke, though only because some people are too stupid and too racist to understand that the joke is on them. As the 19th-century German thinker August Bebel observed, anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, a truism Mr. Baron Cohen has embraced with a vengeance".

Borat could potentially offend Jews, American Southerners, college students, homosexuals, blacks, overweight people and rude New Yorkers, but all is forgiven when you are shown the cleverness with which Mr. Cohen dupes people into believing he is a naïve, funny and exotic piece of Kazakhstan, and shames them to death by capturing their bigotries and quirks on film.

I must interrupt with a spoiler. You've got to give it to Borat for strength of character and superhuman endurance. Who else, when filming his own movie, would agree to lie under an overly obese male, being forced to sniff his…lower parts? He must have worn nose plugs, that's all I could think of. Or maybe the fat guy was wearing an even-fatter suit. Who else would have the cojones to interrupt a conference by chasing a naked man into the hall, all the while wearing ones birthday suit? Incredible moments, say I the incredibly uptight holier than thou proper young woman.

Throughout the movie, Borat talks to his 'producer' in Hebrew. The producer replies in what may be Iranian. My opinion is that Cohen stuck to Hebrew because it's the only foreign language he is fluent in , and he needed consistency. Of course, this is funnier to the Hebrew speakers among us, myself included. The Hebrew spoken did not always match the subtitles, which made it even funnier. The irony lies in Borat's deeply entrenched anti-Semitic thoughts, actions and words.

Americans of the south probably came out worst of all, ranging from a gun dealer who had no qualms showing a gun to a Kazakh man who stated he wanted to shoot Jews but wouldn't sell it to him because of his non-citizen status, to the politicians and laymen who had raptures in a church, speaking in tongues and believing Borat when he pretended to 'accept Mister Jesus'.

Good times, my friends, good times.
Go watch the movie.