Today I was visited by a couple of old Israeli friends of mine.
One had the inevitable laptop, and put on a that Borat video.
I must confess that I found it killingly funny, but that is not the point.
I was reliably informed that when Sacha Baron Cohen is speaking ‘Kazachstani’ he is actually speaking Hebrew (although with prompting I heard the odd Polish expression)
What made me wonder was, do people know that it is a secondary layer of the joke ?
My Israeli friends reckoned that everyone knew, my gut instinct is that nobody who does not understand Hebrew has the faintest idea, and nobody has told them.
Anyways, I’ve known that Sacha Cohen is Jewish and spoke Hebrew instead of ‘Kazahkstani’ (with lots of Polish and Russian tossed in from what I’ve heard) since I’ve watched the Borat skits back when he did them mostly in Britian. Youre’a right in that the average person doesn’t understand Hebrew in the faintest, but I think the real point was just to be speaking some “foreign” language, any foreign language. The other guy in the movie was speaking Armenian, so I don’t think it was really a “secondary joke.”
What is a secondary joke are all the anti-semitic things he spouts out, with the assumption that the viewer knows that he’s actually Jewish. Supposedly he does it to partly reveal the interviewees’ hidden anti-semitism.
I didn’t realize it until I heard him mention it in an interview on Fresh Air. The interview was pretty good, and he wasn’t playing any of his characters in it, just himself.
If speaking Hebrew was part of the joke I never knew it. The source of his humor is making shit up and gullible people who are too polite to call him out are made fools of. Very juvenile, if ask me.
Yeah, I’ve heard that the comedy is supposed to be about drawing out the inner prejudices of people, but I saw very little of that in the film. At worst, they had people too polite to react to Borat’s bigotry. Don’t get me wrong, as a piece of fluffy juvenile comedy I liked it, but I don’t see the supposed social commentary.
I had a discussion with my brother a few years ago where he said he hated Da Ali G Show because the guy on it was such an anti-Semite. I had to explain to him that Baron Cohen is a Jew and the whole thing is a satire.
Satire is lost on a lot of people. When my bf and I saw Borat in the theatre, the guy behind us shouted, “WHAT THE FUCK?!?” every 10 minutes, and at the end of the movie, got up and said loudly, “This is the stupidest movie I ever saw. I’m getting my money back!” … and this was at the $2 theatre. So not everyone is in on the joke.
A lot of what went on in Borat was seeing how much bad behavior (including bigotry) people would tolerate or excuse because the perpetrator was a foreigner who doesn’t know our customs. Seeing how patronizing people were, with their “noble savage” attitudes, was pretty funny. Some folks were provoked into agreeing with bigoted comments, though I think this is more common on Da Ali G Show skits than in the movie.
I don’t call that “patronizing” I just call it polite. I mean really, if a stanger starts spouting off racist statements, and we can’t be entirely sure it’s just not his poor English that’s causing hm to say shit like that- would you really confront him about it?
Basicly, most of the movie is Sacha Baron Cohen doing a cheap Jackass rip-off or making fun of various polite people. The film wasn’t even funny.
It’s not straight-up Hebrew; only about a quarter to a third of what he says in the Borat movie was Hebrew, blended with other stuff that may be Slavic languages but to me sounded like gibberish. Frequently, the Hebrew is pretty random and may or may not have anything to do with the situation the character is in.
I heard an interview with his “producer” (the big fat guy he get naked with shudders) on the radio, Ken Davitian , he is an Armenian from LA. Apparently the other language they speak is Armenian.