Granted, there’s nothing new about laughing at the expense of others (or Others, as a Humanities department might put it), and there are limits as to how much you can mock a paying audience. [$3 for an apple should be cause for either laughter or tears.] Sadly, I think social class has become a much more pervasive theme in America; it’s the new race. Snobbery is about creating distance between yourself and your “inferiors.” But how much distance is there really? That Christ Kindergarten stuff seems pretty weird, but so was a lot of the Quaker shit I’m familiar with. Making up a 5-year old girl to look like a pageant queen is creepy (for that matter, so is making up an 18-year old, to me at least), but in the affluent suburbs these days, parents are robbing young children of their play time and indiscriminately shoving Mandarin lessons, tennis camp, and other success boosters up their asses.

Sometimes foreigners can explain us to ourselves better than we can. Start with Tocqueville and work forward. But globalization enables poor imitations and cheap laughs (nothing wrong with that). It also let’s some of us think that knowing the difference between a baguette and a ficelle makes makes us more European than Bible Belt. Maybe we laugh because we think we’re more different from them than we really are.

Of particular fun - the episodes on animal rights and environmentalism

He once went to visit some environmental protesters in Crystal Palace, South London. They were defending some trees against a development.

Ali asked what they were protesting about. When they expliained in sneery voices that there was a plan to cut down the trees and build a multiplex cinema, Ali-G was of course delighted. After assurances that the cinema would have a car park and popcorn, he was keen to support their campaign.

Pax, Jeff

ps - Go Bucks!

http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=b552c2fa1:10ef7c65ba2:-667e&fr_story=302769364fabd7b4bffdc7688cd318ef32b2c83a&st=1163798402007&mp=WMP&cpf=true&fvn=9&fr=111606_104442_6e0053d9×10ef152d4b3xwb4c&rdm=518730.2857797667

Without access to David Brooks’ article behind NYT’s paid-wall, I can only guess what he was trying to say.

I think the beauty of Borat is that the ticket-buyers include those people Sacha laughs at (the racist, sexist, and those that are simply indifferent). And these people may learn a thing or two after watching.

Let me put myself on the spot here. I am not totally sure that if I were in a group-think mode and under “group-pressure” will I be a racist-lite or as indifferent as some of those people in the film. And I think I learn an important lesson even as I laughed myself to half death.

Quoting Sacha from his insightful Rolling Stone interview (a short excerpt of it is available online for free),
“I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, ‘The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.’ I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it’s an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.”
source: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/sacha_baron_cohen_the_real_borat_finally_speaks

I think Sacha did a great job. For me, it put me on a self-reflective mood that I shouldn’t be too smug and just laugh at those “stupid people” after all. Because, I could be just as “stupid” as they were if I don’t hold my principles firm or just feel indifferent when I shouldn’t. It is much easier to think that we will “do the right thing” then actually “doing the right thing” when the time comes.

Just my 2 cents and sorry for the long post.

Making fun of people different from us has been a core element of comedy ever since, well, comedy. After all, the joke isn’t “Three people just like me walked into a bar” ….