What is Offensive to Whom in Borat, and What Should Offend Us?

John Morreall
College of William and Mary

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Humor can offend people in many ways, and the movie Borat includes many of them. The nudity and references to sex and excretion, most obviously, bother some people. But the mere fact that someone is offended by something doesn’t create a moral objection to it. In the 1930s Adolf Hitler was offended by anti-Nazi satire in German cabarets, and he even created laws and special “joke courts” to prosecute offenders. One comedian was tried and hanged for naming his horse ”Adolf.” But most people today would say that the creators of anti-Nazi humor, and not Hitler, were on the moral high ground.

This example shows that being offensive is not the same as being immoral, and that being offensive can even be morally praiseworthy. We could add more examples from the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and the gay rights movement, all of which offended their opponents by portraying them as narrow-minded and stupid. Consider Godfrey Cambridge in the 1960s and Eddie Izzard today. We can call this kind of humor “consciousness-raising.” It calls into question something that should be questioned, and in doing so, offends those who have a vested interest in not questioning it.

In Borat, much of the offensive humor is of this “consciousness-raising” kind. When Borat and his manager stay at the bed-and-breakfast and discover that their hosts are Jewish, for example, their anti-Semitism emerges. They refuse to eat the food prepared for them. At night, when they see bugs in their room, they say that they are really Jews who have shifted their shape. The belief in evil shape-shifting is uncommon in North America, of course, and so this scene is unlikely to offend North Americans. But Borat does get many of the Americans he meets to reveal their anti-Semitism in other ways. When he asks the gun dealer, “What is the best gun to defend from a Jew?” the man says, “I would recommend either a 9mm or a 45.” If that gun dealer saw the movie, he would probably be offended by that scene, but I see nothing morally objectionable in making fun of people for their anti-Semitism, especially by getting them to express it in a way that shows how stupid it is.

In a scene cut from the final version of the movie, Borat is singing in a country-and-western bar, and introduces a song “from my country” that has the chorus “Throw the Jew down the well, so our country can be free.” The second time he sings this chorus, he asks the bar patrons to join in, which they do enthusiastically. Again, these people would probably be offended if they saw themselves in the movie, but I see nothing morally objectionable in Cohen’s tricking them into showing their stupid anti-Semitism.

Several other scenes work in the same way. When the car dealer is trying to sell Borat either a Corvette or a Hummer--vehicles he calls “pussy magnets”--Borat asks him how fast you would need to drive to kill Gypsies, and he says, “35 or 40 would do it.” In talking to the man at the rodeo in Virginia about gays, Borat says, “In my country we take them to jail and hang them.” The man says, “That’s what we’re trying to get done here!” He looks like a stupid bigot, but it’s not a bad thing to reveal the stupidity of bigotry.

As the rodeo begins, Borat is introduced by the master of ceremonies as a foreign visitor, and he begins, “Can I say first, that we support your war of terror. May the U. S. of A kill every single terrorist. May George Bush drink the blood of every single man, woman and child of Iraq.” That draws a big cheer from the crowd. Borat is energized. “May you destroy their country so for one thousand years not even a lizard will survive in their desert.” More cheers for an utterly insane wish that the United States annihilate Iraq.

Another scene that works like this is the one in the trailer when Borat gets the frat boys to complain how minorities and women are taking away the power that rightfully belongs to white men. All of this humor, I suggest, may offend those who were made to look like stupid bigots--but that’s a good thing.

Having praised one kind of humor in Borat, let me now criticize another. To unify this movie, Sacha Baron Cohen put crudity, boorishness, sexism, and many kinds of prejudice into a single lead character, which he played. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that. But he presented that character as a typical man from Kazakhstan, thereby creating a stereotype that didn’t exist before—the crude, boorish, bigoted, sexist Kazakh.

Cohen based this Kazakh character on a man he had met in southern Russia, and many of the character’s features fit negative stereotypes of unsophisticated Russians. But, of course, if he had made his lead character a Russian and called the movie “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Russia,” the movie would have never been produced. The Russian government would have made sure of that. But the government of Kazakhstan has little political clout. It did take out a four-page ad in the New York Times to counter the stereotype Cohen was creating, but that had little effect.

Kazakhs are not Russians but a mix of Turkic and Mongolian peoples whose traditional way of life was based on nomadic herding. Beginning in the 19th century, they were dominated by Russia, but they fought back both in the Tsarist era and in the Communist era. In 1916 thousands of Kazakhs were killed resisting the seizure of their land and forced conscription into the Russian army. Thousands more fled to China and Mongolia. Under Stalin and Khrushchev, huge tracts of Kazakh grazing land were converted to agriculture for the benefit of Russia. In resisting this colonization, a million-and-a-half Kazakhs died, along with 80% of their livestock. Russian settlers were brought in to displace the native people, until by the 1970s Kazakhstan was the only Soviet republic in which the native people were in the minority.

In creating a new stereotype of Kazakhs with negative features often attributed to Russians, Sacha Baron Cohen has insulted Kazakhs twice. He has portrayed them as having negative features they don’t have. Anti-semitism was never widespread in Kazakhstan, nor was the persecution of Gypsies. Women have rights equal to men. To make matters worse, Cohen has taken those features from stereotypes of their oppressors. Creating this new stereotype isn’t just offensive to Kazakhs. It should be offensive to morally sensitive people in general.

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