There's something funny about Borat. Unfortunately, the joke's on us

Something was a tad off about the chuckles that erupted in the taped-off section of media VIPs at an early press screening of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, renegade comic Sacha Baron Cohen's new feature film. Something just a little too smug and overeager. It began just as the opening credits rolled: Done in faux naïve style, they evoked the chintziest of state-sponsored graphics and were set to a jaunty Central Asian folk-music score.

Hilarious!

Was the laughter coming from that clutch of young New Yorker staffers? Or from Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and his crew? It was everywhere, really, the self-satisfied chortling of an audience so antsy to demonstrate they were in on the joke that they couldn't wait for the joke itself. It was laughter that said, basically, Reminds me of my year abroad! This guy's really nailing it! And: By the way, I'm much smarter than those flyover assholes he's going to be hoodwinking for the next hour and a half, just in case anyone was wondering!

Why the hurry? There would be plenty of actual humor to laugh at later. A series of brilliantly improvised set pieces revolving around the Andy Kaufman–esque skunk-at-the-garden-party shtick Cohen perfected on his TV series Da Ali G Show for the BBC, and later HBO, the film takes the form of a classic road movie. In it, Borat Sagdiyev, a reporter for Kazakh television, comes to America to document our way of life, accompanied by a hirsute and heavily built producer and an unseen cameraman. After a brief sojourn in New York, he spots Pamela Anderson on a rerun of Baywatch, falls instantly in love ("Who was this CJ?"), and heads off to Los Angeles to find her. The plot is thin, to say the least, a filament of pretext stitching together a number of Cohen's trademark pseudo-documentary pranks: Borat singing a redneck-baiting version of the national anthem at a rodeo, getting saved at a Pentecostal camp revival, seeking fashion advice at a housing project, hitching a ride with drunken frat boys, and so on.

For years now, the Kazakhs have been taking issue with Cohen's portrayal of their country as an intellectual no-fly-zone rife with incest, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. In a 2004 Talk of the Town piece for the New Yorker, sometime Radar contributor Daniel Radosh interviewed Roman Vassilenko, press secretary for the Kazakhstan embassy. He pointed out that the country—which has a thriving Jewish community and has allowed women to vote since 1920 (not that their votes meant much under Soviet rule or the current authoritarian regime)—is in many respects the opposite of Cohen's fantasy. In response to his satire, the Kazakhs shut down Borat's locally based website, www.borat.kz, which he quickly replaced with www.borat.tv.

One can sympathize with the Kazakhs' complaints while also recognizing that they aren't really the butt of Borat's jokes at all. Americans are. Particularly the rubes in the hinterlands—ones who have yet to subscribe to HBO—without whose cooperation Borat would be little more than a somewhat taller Yakov Smirnoff (still knockin' em dead five times a week in Branson, Missouri). What Cohen manages to reveal, beneath these all-too-easy marks' condescending solicitousness, brittle Southern hospitality, and syrupy Christian charity is the utter cluelessness of most of Americans about the rest of the world—the same cheerful, self-satisfied know-nothingism that was so enthusiastically nurtured and exploited by the neocons as they rallied the nation for the geopolitical face-plant still underway in Iraq. In which regard, Sacha Baron Cohen and the Bush brain trust are really playing the same game: punking a nation of geography dropouts who aren't quite sure how to pronounce the name of the country they invaded less than four years ago (Is it ay-rak or ee-rak or ee-rok, anyway?) and are even less sure why it matters. According to former ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith, just two months before invading Iraq, Bush had no idea there were two major sects of Islam. Cohen could have a field day with a guy like that. Too bad "mighty warlord Premier Bush" was unavailable the other day when Borat showed up at the White House gate with a screening invite.

It's not just the Wal-Mart crowd whose ignorance is exposed by Borat. Even for those of us who are in on the joke, the humor only works because we know practically nothing about Kazakhstan ourselves. After all, if Cohen ran around playing, say, an "Italian," but one that neither looked, dressed, nor acted like an Italian and didn't speak with an Italian accent—the gag wouldn't really make much sense. So however knowing and superior our laughter may be, Cohen's impression of a Kazakh only "works" for an audience who has no real idea what a Kazakh is.

One day in the not-so-distant future—in cinema studies seminars if nowhere else—Borat will undoubtedly read as a 9/11 movie (just like Snakes on a Plane), a pop-culture pressure valve for our subconscious fears of swarthy Orientals with bad facial hair. Borat is not a Muslim—in his home village, "we follow the hawk," he explains to the Pentecostal preacher. But as a vaguely Middle Eastern–seeming foreigner in our midst, he's a comedic stand-in for all those unseen sleeper-cell cowboys supposedly plotting our destruction from a video store in Jersey City. Seeing Borat tormenting an indulgent driving instructor, one can easily imagine how Mohamed Atta and his colleagues managed to take those flying lessons—and skip the part about landing—without raising serious suspicions. Borat's mooning over Pam Anderson evokes the hijackers' drunken lap-dance binges in the weeks leading up to the attacks. And when he unleashes a chicken on the No. 4 train, one can see the moment of panic in the eyes of New York straphangers: Dirty bomb?

Nah, just some assholes making a movie.

A portrait of American hubris at its most willfully ill-informed, Borat, in the end, is really more a tragedy than a comedy. Needless to say, it's funny as hell.