0n Sunday night, I settled in to watch the season premiere of Family Guy. Next to The Office, I'd contend that the politically incorrect cartoon is the funniest thing on television. But this week, the best it could elicit was the occasional chuckle.
The show itself was fine; I could appreciate in the abstract that it was clever. The problem was, no comedy was going to stack up to what I had seen two nights previous.
What happened at Toronto's Elgin Theatre on Friday night was not so much a film premiere as a pop-culture phenomenon. Tickets were being scalped for several times face value; the young couple beside us, decked out in T-shirts they'd made that morning to honour the occasion, seemed almost nervous with anticipation. Along with the rest of the audience, they cheered before the credits had begun, drowned out the dialogue with laughter throughout and chanted the title character's name once the lights had come back on.
All this for a movie about Borat Sagdiyev: a character who would, to the uninitiated, sound like nothing more than the crudest comic caricature - sort of a far more outrageous Yakov Smirnoff for post-Soviet Central Asia.
A TV reporter from Kazakhstan, Borat is the creation of Sacha Baron Cohen - the British comedian behind cult favourite Da Ali G Show. Initially a supporting character to clueless wannabe gangsta Ali G, Borat has taken on a life of his own - so much so that the social impact of his feature film debut, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is already being analyzed in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Presumably, the character was initially intended to serve the same purpose as Ali G - to catch off-guard interview subjects under the illusion they they're talking to a real journalist. Borat suckers them in under the premise that they're speaking with an ignorant Kazakh for a show that nobody in the Western world will see. As his questions get more and more sexist, anti-Semitic and generally inappropriate, the fun is in watching his subjects' reaction. Some storm off; others do their best to gently correct him. And when Baron Cohen really hits the gold mine, they agree with him.
Somewhere along the way, though, Borat began to stand on his own as a character - the fun more in watching his reaction to the people he meets than vice versa.
To sustain what are normally five-minute set pieces over an hour-and-a-half, the film has a loose plot (Borat is sent by his government to report back on America, but gets sidetracked by a quest to find Pamela Anderson and throw her in his "marriage sack"). But that's just an excuse to string together his inappropriate reactions to various scenarios - everything from a meeting with a feminist group to a Southern dinner party to an already infamous appearance at a Texas rodeo that goes very, very badly.
Such fish-out-of-water exploits are nothing new. The past decade's most successful comedy franchise, after all, was the Austin Powers films - the entirely fictitious exploits of Mike Myers's unfrozen secret agent. But what sets Borat apart is that few comedians have ever tackled characters with so ferocious a commitment.
Most comedians, even if they took their creations into real-world situations, would do so with a wink. We would always know that, underneath the mustache and the makeup, it was our friendly actor. Interview subjects would quickly spot the ruse; if they didn't, he'd eventually reveal himself. And if things got hairy, the comedian would pull the chute by breaking character.
Baron Cohen, on the other hand, embodies Borat so much that he has brought him to life. Not only has he remained in character to promote the film; he has refused to break it even when his safety is in peril from whomever he's offended - or, at least once, when he has faced arrest. So intrinsically does he understand who Borat is that, when one of the film's scenes compels him to consume copious amounts of beer, he behaves exactly as we'd expect of a drunken Borat.
A great many comedians have tried to use satire to lampoon prejudice - Borat's stock-in-trade - with varying levels of success. But what makes Baron Cohen (an active anti-racism campaigner) so successful is that he doesn't use his character as a thin veil behind which to air his social views. Instead, having sketched out the perfect character with which to do so, he simply becomes him and sees where it takes him.
Sadly, Borat's future is limited; from here on, his fame will prevent him from tricking much of anyone. But with his high-risk, high-reward creation, an artist willing to go the distance for his craft has made nearly every other comedian on the planet look safe and uninspired.
