Friday, November 03, 2006

Borat (No Angel) Lands; Lock Up the Childrens


In Kazakhstan, a little backtracking. Yerlan Idrissov, Kazakhstan ambassador to Great Britain, told Kazakhtan Today: "If you read attentively my recent article in the "Guardian" you will find out that highly appreciating the comic gifts of S.B. Cohen I gave the "pig of a man" not to himself, but to Borat - a wild scenic character invented by Cohen. I believe that the creator of the character himself does not consider Borat as an angel," the diplomat wrote in his letter to Kazakhstan Today.

Borat conjures history for The New York Times: Like General Sherman, he also lays waste to a sizable swath of the South, a line of attack that begins in New York and ends somewhere between the Hollywood Hills and Pamela Anderson's bosom.

The New Yorker, no enemy to a good simile weighed in this way:

This defense of Borat as an unwitting scourge of the reactionary — unearthing Midwestern beliefs no less parochial than those he left behind in Kazakhstan — is sound as far as it goes. But the movie goes further. It is equipped, like an F-15 Eagle, to engage multiple targets at once.

Continuing ...

More recently, the case for disturbance has been made by the novelist Howard Jacobson, who has insisted, both within and beyond his books, that comedy is not just enfeebled but put to sleep, like an unwanted animal, once it discards its right and duty to offend.

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