Is there something offensive about Borat, “Kazakhstan’s sixth most famous man” and the second comedic invention of Sacha Baron Cohen to be give celluloid treatment* ? This would seem not so much a rhetorical question as a flagrantly disingenuous one. Borat, whose persona is composed of a toxic mixture of Asperberger-lite obliviousness and charmless pushiness, regularly indulges in remarks about Jews, blacks, women, and gypsies that not so much insult them as render them as untermenschen. In reports about and trailers for Cohen’s film, the pidgin-Englished Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, we have Borat asking a group of feminists what it’s like for women to have smaller brains than men, Borat telling Alan Keyes (that rare specimen, a black Republican) that he has a “chocolate face,” and, most famously, Borat leading a singalong with rubes in a C&W bar, in which he asks them “throw the Jew down the well/ so my country can be free.“

And of course, it’s all hilarious, particularly for an audience that would never dream of attending a gig by Bernard Manning, Tarbie, or any of those other sweaty stand-up dinosaurs from the 1970s. Aside from the simple fact that Baron Cohen is intelligent whereas the old-style comedians reached for a golf club when confronted with an original idea, Cohen’s act is made acceptable by the belief that it exposes prejudice rather than reinforces it. In a rare out-of-character moment Baron Cohen himself has explained that the new film, like his television work, is a “dramatic demonstration of how racism feeds on dumb conformity as much as rabid bigotry.”

One wonders if the audience chortling at Borat’s goading of women and blacks appreciates the subtle deconstruction going on. It would certainly take an advanced student of media studies to elucidate why telling a black man that he has a “chocolate face” constitutes a dramatic expose of racism. Unless Keyes’s dumbfounded reaction exposes that he’s actually a racist.

Although it’s a truism that film-makers often underestimate the intelligence of their viewers, it is not impossible for them to overestimate their smarts, either. For example, I can recall an interview with the writer of the British sitcom Death Us Do Part, Johnny Speight. The sitcom was basically a platform for the bigoted and impotent rantings of Alf Garnet, played by Warren Mitchell. According to Speight, he eventually wanted to stop writing the show because he grew sick of reading letters from viewers telling him that Alf was bloody right when he ranted about darkies, Micks, commies, etc.

Similarly, those not sufficiently smart to appreciate Baron Cohen’s exposure of “dumb conformity” might be misguided enough to think that Borat’s schtik is really just a wonderful send up of those backward countries that have failed to live up to the West’s standards. Although Borat’s putative homeland is one of the more reliable partners in The War Against Terror, Kazakhstan is portrayed as suffering from all the intolerance, bigotry, and misogyny that the forces of enlightenment are trying to defeat with lessons in liberal democracy and heavy ordnance.

And Baron Cohen, aware of just how far to push to envelope, has tapped into the growing disgust, even among the educated classes in Europe and the United States, with the neo-medievalism of the Islamic “arc of extremism” by judiciously shifting the locus a little further to the East and, of course, by having his character be white. If we had Borat transformed into, say, an Afghan or a Pakistani cracking jokes about child brides and honor killings, the cinema auditorium would be shocked into embarrassed silence. And anyway, Peter Sellars (a figure Baron Cohen is oft compared with) already did the funny oriental gentleman routine in a film few television stations now seem willing to transmit, Blake Edwards’s The Party.