The humor of Borat is simply naive, yet confident enough to entertain guests with a creative portrayal of a character visiting America from the far away land of Kazakastan. At first, you have to laugh at Sasha Cohen’s depiction of a character devoid of any universal manners. It is creative, how incredibly civil Cohen can depict an individual that constantly degrades women by associating them as nothing more than the submissives of his delight. Yet, even as Borat was firing off incredibly offensive conversation pieces to women in his travels, all the women in the theatre were laughing uncontrollably.
The main idea of this movie is Borat. He is in America filming a movie for his home country intended to teach his uncivilized people the ways of America. However, convoluted as his actual desires to flim an informative movie were, he changes his campaign after watching an episode of Baywatch, and moreover watching the every movement of Pamela Anderson. He falls in love with the movie star, and takes off from NYC to LA to ask her to marry him.
At this point, I started to wonder if this movie could really steep below that of JackAss 2 in vulgarity. This question will most definitely be answered later.
Borat’s humor is so incredibly unbelievably naive, that the audience laughs more as a necessity to not stand out than anything. I am not purposrting that the movie did not have some moments of truly unique humor, I just didn’t find it as overally hilarious as its record breaking numbers at the box office have indicated.
Creativiely, the movie is shot like that of a documentary, yet in truth being nothing close to a documentary. This type of filming is not uniquely creative, but well done in repetition of past fake documentary comedies.
I did find the scene of Borat’s rodeo experience as unique in humor and writing. Instead of singing the American National Anthem as planned, Borat begins to sing some made up indictment of American occupation in Iraq to the tune of our National Anthem. This scene was truly funny.
However, the movie relied on about 12 minutes of full male nudity to carry it through the middle portions of the story. Not only were the two male characters nude, but also extremely inappropriate and gross. And at one point, I think I wanted to leave due to a very grotesque moment in this unfortunate 12 minutes.
At this point, the movie lost me, I started to think about whether it was of value to be creatively grotesque and uniquely motivated to push societal limits. I worry that the intrinsic nature of unique behavior to be valued due to its dangerous tenant of societal degradation.
But in the same way that Borat’s exploitations are shamefully testing limits of good taste, they might also be creatively ensuring the very marketplace that is essential in value to be free.
In essence, Borat’s utter disregard for class and manners is not creatively ilustrating a film different than any other vulgarity on the market, but his very obnoxious testing of good taste is also beneficial in keeping a stretched marketplace for other ideas of radical change. Without the free expression of the creative obscene antics of those most liberal and conservative, our public realm of source and domain would be incredibly more limiting. So, keep on grossing them out Borat, for your antics might keep the public sphere unlimited enough to inspire some sort of radical transformation.
