Say No to Borat!

I have no intention of seeing Sacha Baron Cohen's "movie film". Usually I would say that disqualified me from commenting on it. But stick with me -- I have some pretty strong views on what Cohen seems to regard as acceptable ways of geting laughs and making money. (For what it's worth, when I went to see the latest Scorsese epic I saw the Borat trailer. I didn't find it funny. But that's beside the point, or at least bseide my point).

When Ali G first appeared on TV in the UK, it provided some wonderful moments: Mohamed al-Fayed dancing around the stage chanting his own name, Tony Benn maintaining his rigorous socialist correctness in the face of ever more provocative questioning from Ali G, to name but two. (And one other personal favourite: Ali G's gleeful reaction when some royal hanger-on or other described Camilla Parker Bowles as "a very fit woman". You couldn't have scripted a better set-up line -- though I'm tempted to think that Cohen scripted that one).

Throughout that series, Cohen's unwitting victims saw their own pretensions unveiled and then fairly gently mocked. That's OK; they were mostly public figures who should have been able to take care of themselves. However, there was another aspect of the show that started to trouble me. Although Ali G was presented as a white trash yoof who just wished he were black, it was clear that Cohen was using the character to get laughs by skewering black urban culture. It's not hard to guess what the reaction would have been if a black comedian had attempted the reverse trick by playing an equally stereotyped Jewish character.

I lost interest in Ali G in the second TV series, partly because it was becoming harder to believe that the "victims" weren't in on the joke, and partly because the hugely offensive Borat character was introduced.

So to the current "movie film", which as I say I have not seen. Once again Cohen's character embodies vicious racial stereotypes of a kind that he would justifiably find very objectonable if they were apllied to Jews. But he is no longer using his comic creation to lure unsuspecting public figures into dropping their guard. Now he is using a variety of techniques (getting his victims drunk seems to be one of the less reprehensible) to get ordinary people not just to look foolish, but to portray themselves as racists and anti-semites. It seems to me that this is a slur not only on Kazakhs, through the Borat character himself, but also on the Americans who are Borat's victims. This is a pretty unpleasant way to make money.

One last, semi-personal note: I haven't met Sacha Baron Cohen, but he went to the same Cambridge college as I did. Famous graduates: John Milton....Charles Darwin....Earl Mountbatten of Burma....me....Cohen. Things definitely seem to be going in the wrong direction!