Other Crap

Grumpy Kazakhs invite Borat to "his" land, at last

• I have mixed feelings about Borat's feud with Kazakhstan. On the one hand, I feel that he might have been better off if he had simply made up a fictitious country in Eastern Europe or Central Asia. If you weren't aware of it, none of his material actually has anything to do with Kazakhstan, other than the occasional mention of a real place or name. The scenes are filmed in Romania; the phrases he speaks are actually derived from Polish; and the culture he affects is completely bogus. He could change his origin to any obscure culture and the routine would work just as well. He could just as easily have claimed an origin from Estonia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Herzegovina, Tajikistan or a couple dozen more places in the former Soviet Union or Soviet Bloc. Kazahkstan just happened to draw the short straw.
• Having noted that, we need to realize that an important element of Cohen's humor is derived from the ignorance of the real people he encounters in the USA and UK, and he constantly hammers away at the fact that he can say anything he likes about a real country - the ninth largest country in the world - and nobody ever seems to know that he is completely wrong in every detail. It is surprising that he never seems to get unmasked by the people he pranks. My family comes from Uzbekistan and still has family there and in Kazakhstan, and the older people in the family would immediately spot Borat as an imposter. And, of course, Polish speakers should immediate recognize the phrases he uses and pronounces almost correctly. It seems that someone in America would speak Polish or Kazakh or Russian to him and realize he's just winging it. But nobody ever does. (Or maybe those episodes are left on the cutting room floor.) That point would be lost if he came from a fictitious country.