U.S. Culture and Customs

U.S. Culture and Customs

Sacra Baron Cohen is certainly a talented comedian whose work echoes both outrageously hilarious Jewish humour originating from such hubs of global Jewish culture as Odessa, Ukraine, or New York and, strangely enough, such lost or thoroughly forgotten traditions as that of the bold "pent-up comics" of the 1950s to the early 1960s in the U.S. For example, Bruce with his poignant satire of U.S. society comes to mind instantly as a possible important progenitor: Borat's rodeo performance on the Iraq War strikes me as vintage Lenny. And yet this feature film leaves one with an eerie feeling of sadness and melancholia. Were he still alive, the sick comic Bruce would most certainly approve of Borat. After all, maybe Socrates was right when at the end of the huge drinking party in the Symposium he explained to his cronies that an author of good comedy is somehow simultaneously a tragedian and vice versa. Certain episodes of Borat may signal the advent of a new, post-Cold War epoch of infallible black humour, the black humour of the unipolar, U.S.-run world, the humour that causes a bitter smile, some sort of laughter through tears: for now I will only give an example of the touching scene in the car after Borat and the Black sex worker Luenell are thrown out of a Southern white home (the white U.S. South's idea of etiquette of good manners is thus brilliantly mocked). In what is arguably the most piquantly uneasy episode of the whole film, a visibly embarrassed Borat tells the woman he is sorry -- and thus the irony: presumably, it takes a British comedian to apologize to her on the behalf of the whole white population of the U.S. South!

It is also quite plausible that Borat has another crucial predecessor in satirizing the culture and society of the United States. Charlie Chaplin's A King in New York (1957) bears a number of resemblances to the mockumentary. It is also possible that Cohen echoes intentionally or alludes to his great compatriot in several ways throughout the film. I limit myself to mentioning a few of these hypothetical parallels. Borat's "producer" Azamat Bagatov is dressed like Chaplin's tramp when Borat finally finds him in Los Angeles and the latter refers to the former as "Hitler": Chaplin's The Great Dictator is one of his best-known satires. The rodeo performance may be compared with King Shahdov's famous scene in the trial room. Amid general satirizing, both films seem to have a streak of almost sentimental sympathy to the U.S. in them; in Borat this is achieved through the introduction of Luenell, the sex worker; in A King in New York -- via the boy Rupert character played by Chaplin's eleven-year-old son who is suspicious of all authority and government in the world. It can be understood not as a playfully Marxist or communist argument but as a declaration of US-Americanness: historically and "mythologically" there is no legitimate authority in the ...