Bored That

At one time in my life, I would have been among the first to rush out to see "Borat," which some are describing as one of the funniest movies ever. But now I think I'll pass on the latest and greatest in cynical comedy. Melik Kaylan had a piece in Thursday's Wall Street Journal called Spoiled Borat which helps explain why:

It now seems clear that, hitherto, television's codes curbed Mr. Cohen's taste, both as Ali G and as Borat, for outrage bordering on vileness. The laxer motion-picture code has freed him to reveal his own fatal flaw. In the movie, Borat is welcomed to dinner in a well-intentioned American home as a foreign visitor anxious to learn Western manners. He excuses himself in mid-meal and returns with a little mesh sack full of human ordure. "What I do with this?" he asks. (I know what I would say, but the dismayed hostess is too polite and takes him back to the bathroom.) At this juncture, the theater falls silent. Which side are we on here? Ingenious postmodern commentators argue that this is where Mr. Cohen gets real, Brechtian even, and transcends comedy, forcing the audience profoundly to question itself. Perhaps so. But this is also where his bullying nihilism herniates into full view and stays in our faces. Each scene thereafter unveils either embarrassment, humiliation or hairy genitalia, unredeemed by laughter, inviting us to savor, and then to applaud, our own discomfort. No doubt that is what the Kazakhs would be doing, if only they could be as ironic as we are.