I’m shocked!

I certainly did not mean to suggest that this was the typical behavior of self-described liberals.

60: No, Borat isn’t really different at all from Latka Gravas. Andy Kaufman was a pig. His later antics make that much more obvious. But Latka is plenty offensive enough, even if I didn’t quite understand why as a teenager. Mork? I don’t remember it well enough to judge. He wasn’t indicated as any particular race or ethnicity explicitly and I don’t recall if there were obvious enough tropes that it qualifies, but assuming there were, I’d say it’s essentially the same schtick.

Meanwhile, I think SB-C is a dick, but Ali G was definitely supposed to be white.

I hadn’t realised that our opinions overlap 99.99% of the time, so it saddens me that we must part ways over Borat.

Seriously, to address your point (and that of several others, starting with engels), I should make clear that I agree that much of Baron Cohen’s work is coarse, and that a Kazakh (or generic eastern European or central Asian—only the latter really applies to K’stan, but Baron Cohen is, I think deliberately, pretty vague about what sort of place Borat’s “Kazakhstan” is) could well take offence. I’d think them a bit thinskinned myself, but certainly well within their rights. [FN 1] Baron Cohen’s American targets have more serious grounds to be offended, but then they are for the most part people who deserve offence. I don’t want to come over as an impassioned defender of Baron Cohen. I simply think one’s offence-o-metre has to be calibrated very loosely to dismiss the film as mere racist bigotry. (Kaveh @46, I know Borat only from the film. What you describe from SNL is less defensible though still, I think, not quite equivalent to Der Stürmer.)

Roy @48,

A Jew making a stand-up career pretending to be a bling-draped Arab hip-hop wannabe Muslim asshole

It’s an uncommon Arab, I’d say, who rejoices in the name “Alistair Leslie Graham”. It might be the “Ali” part that has you thinking Baron Cohen’s first famous character is an Arab. It is, instead, just part of his wannabeicity. I don’t find Ali G the funniest thing in the world, I’m sorry to say, but I will always have a place in my heart for him after his Sammy Wilson interview.

[FN 1] Apparently, though, few Kazakhs are offended. On the whole they seem to think the film a scream, as Novakant notes @62; but to be fair one should also note that, whatever about your man in the Almalinskiy omnibus, at the time the Kazakh government was very definitely not amused (until, if I what I heard is correct, their president’s daughter told them to lighten up).

I guess it fails as Bush culture because the show has the lead characters remain the most popular people on Earth.

P.S.: I’m so geeky that when I first came across Sacha Baron-Cohen’s oeuvre, I wondered if there was any relation to Simon Baron-Cohen – turns out they’re cousins.

I did try reading some of the Newsweek efforts. I liked the one on American Idol:

Start with the title: in England, the show was called “Pop Idol”—but when it migrated here in 2002, it apparently needed an infusion of patriotism. So, much like freedom fries, “American Idol” was born. …

And like Dubya, the show makes a virtue of its unflagging consistency. “Idol” is the most predictable show on television. Simon Cowell is always the evil one. (It’s no accident that he’s also the only foreigner at the judges’ table.)

But Simon Cowell is the evil one in England [sic] too. This whole exercise couldn’t be reading too much into Bush could it?

The whole “it’s a joke on unsuspecting racists” is just thrown in to make all the straight up racism palatable and guilt free.

King Darius with eye makeup in 300 was a better “sample of standard homophobic “the enemy-is-effeminate””, imo, than Saddam Hussein in South Park. The latter wasn’t actually effeminate, iirc, at least not in any other ways, not in the way that, say, Prince Edward in Braveheart was. It’s more like his hyper-masculinity is rolled over to a negative value, and his “submitting” to the devil is funny because it’s ironic. I think he and Borat are of a type, which different from the effeminate tyrant motif, though there is some overlap.

Seriously though, watching good lighting work is amazing.