Village residents to sue Borat

I've wondered before how true a sociological study Borat's comedy really is. It's often hailed as a sort of muckraking, uncovering America's racist underside. It's hilarious and un-PC to boot.

(For those of you who've been living under rocks the past month, Borat is a kind of reality-show comedian. Pretending to be a journalist from Kazakhstan, he says outrageous things -- anti-Semitic and misogynist, mostly -- and gets other to react. Often, the funniest skits are when people agree with him.)

Borat's most notorious skit was when he got a group of rural Southerners to sing along to "Throw the Jew Down the Well," a country song he wrote. I've wondered how selective the camera work was (some members of the crowd cheer while a few have quizzical looks as it is), and how much the audience's reaction was simply alcohol. It certainly says something about anti-Semitism, but I'm not sure to what degree.

The point implied, that Southerners in particular hate Jews, is also suspect. I bet you could get inner city blacks to sing along if you set it to rap music (they don't seem to like middleman minorities much either, though they're not acceptable targets for ridicule like Southerners are), but Borat isn't as interested in making urban people look stupid. In his new movie, the closest he comes is kissing New Yorkers and watching them threaten him.

In the last week, two lawsuits have indicated how unrealistic Borat's movie ("Throw the Jew" was part of a TV show, not the new movie) really is. First, a group of frat boys sued, alleging that Borat's team told them (A) the movie wouldn't be shown in the U.S. and (B) to drink as much as possible. They appear pretty dumb and pretty inebriated, at one point lamenting the end of slavery.

Now, villagers shown in the film, including a man with one arm, finally realized how they were portrayed. The story is worth quoting at length:

"But now the villagers of this tiny, close-knit community have angrily accused the comedian of exploiting them, after discovering his new blockbuster film portrays them as a backward group of rapists, abortionists and prostitutes, who happily engage in casual incest.

"They claim film-makers lied to them about the true nature of the project, which they believed would be a documentary about their hardship, rather than a comedy mocking their poverty and isolation.

"Villagers say they were paid just £3 each for this humiliation, for a film that took around £27 million at the worldwide box office in its first week of release."

Is not nice. Is over the line, in fact.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.