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Home , Ali G, Ali G Indahouse, Borat, Borat (soundtrack), Da Ali G Show, Sacha Baron Cohen

Susanne Schmid

Taking Embarrassment to Its Extremes: and Cultural Anxiety

The mock-documentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of presents the fictitious Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev on an educational trip through the of America. If the actor, , is Jewish, the character Borat is anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic, racist and besides rather ignorant of the country he calls the ‘U.S. and A’. Through taking about Eastern countries to their extreme, Baron Cohen holds up a mirror to unmask seemingly civilised Westerners. Among the aesthetic means employed by him is a concentration on the grotesque and the embarrassing body that does not conform to norms (incest, homosexuality, faeces etc.). The film led to a number of com- plaints by individuals who felt that they had been tricked into participating and aroused the anger of Kazakh officials, who saw their country misrepresented.

1. Introduction The comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has achieved global fame through appear- ing in the guise of a number of fictitious and exaggerated personae, three of whom have achieved notoriety: the ignorant suburban from Staines, a rapper with Caribbean pronunciation; Brüno, a gay Austrian fash- ion designer; and the homophobic, racist and misogynist Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev. These characters underwent some changes in the course of time; Borat for example was first conceived as the reporter Kristo from Al- bania1 and re-emerged in in the year 2000 under his current name. Born in to an Orthodox Jewish family in 1971, the Cambridgeeducated Baron Cohen conducts interviews during which he elic- its racist, homophobic, misogynist and other unacceptable statements, often from well-known public figures, and broadcasts selections from these. In The 11 O’Clock Show, a satirical programme, he first appeared as Ali G, whose Jamaican accent and inane questions perfectly misled his interviewees. As Ali G he questioned, for example, Sir Rhodes Boyson, former Under- Secretary of Education, about the reintroduction of corporal punishment in schools and got him to praise the advantages of caning.2 Baron Cohen ex-

1 Cf. Tim Cornwell, ‘Rise of the Comic Kazach Who Used to Be Albanian’, The Scotsman (20 October 2006) [accessed 2 September 2009]. 2 Cf. Robert A. Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen: Politics, Parody, and the Battle Over Borat (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), p.37. Another recent introduction is Kathleen Tracy, Sacha Baron Cohen: The Unauthorised Biography (: JR Books, 2008). A thorough analysis of Ali G is provided in Richard Howells, ‘“Is it Because I is 260 Susanne Schmid poses his unwitting victims, and, on a larger scale, the societal mechanism that produces , misogyny, anti-Semitism and violence. Here is a brief chronology of Baron Cohen’s rise to fame:3 In 1998, he began to appear with his fake interviews on The 11 O’Clock Show. In 2000, Da Ali G Show followed, again a series of interviews which exposed their victims. In 2002, a film with the meanwhile extremely popular Ali G ap- peared, (dir. by Mark Mylod), and in 2003, Da Ali G Show was exported to America and shown on HBO. The films Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, ac- cording to a ‘watershed comic event’,4 and the hitherto less ac- claimed Brüno followed in 2006 and 2009 respectively. The comic personae had to change because Ali G and Borat eventually became so well-known that Baron Cohen was recognised before he was able to trick anyone. Surrounded by controversies, Borat quickly grew into a cult figure. As, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, Western Europeans began to have far more contact with Eastern Europe than before, Borat, who conjures up the image of the uncultured Eastern “other”, epitomises the fear of the intrusion of the unknown, like Valentina, the grotesque Ukrainian immigrant in Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005).5 The ‘man- child’6 Borat also embodies the audience’s infantile pleasure in rule- breaking. When, in 2005, Baron Cohen flew to the MTV European Music Awards ceremony in as Borat with a one-eyed, drunken pilot and in a propeller plane supposedly run by a Kazakh airline, he incited Kazakh politi- cians to threaten legal action, yet found a large audience full of admiration for his pranks.7 With the release of the award-winning film Borat, the con- troversies and court cases reached an all-time high, and so did Boratmania. In

Black?” Race, Humour and the Polysemiology of Ali G’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 26 (2006), 155-77. 3 For the dates cf. Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, pp.33-55. 4 David Ansen, ‘Cinematic Fantastic’, Newsweek (15 December 2006) [accessed 2 September 2009]. 5 If the recent immigrant Valentina is characterised by her surgically enlarged breast and the sexual attraction she deliberately uses to ensnare the octogenarian ‘Pappa’, Borat is associ- ated with embarrassing sexuality, too, and is even shown masturbating in public. For a dis- cussion of Lewycka’s novel cf. Doris Lechner’s article in the present volume. 6 Dickie Wallace, ‘Hyperrealizing “Borat” with the Map of the European “Other”’, Slavic Review, 67 (2008), 35-49 (p.39). This issue of Slavic Review (67.1) contains eight articles and commentaries about Borat. 7 Cf. Steven Morris, ‘Kazakhstan Up in Arms over Ali G Spoof’, (15 November 2005) [accessed 2 September 2009]; Saunders, The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen, pp.102f. A summary of the contro- versy is available in Robert A. Saunders, ‘In Defence of Kazakshilik: Kazakhstan’s War on Sa- cha Baron Cohen’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 14 (2007), 225-55.