‘Borat’ isn’t cruel or unusual, it’s the skewering we desperately need

There’s something magical about looking around the movie theater and realizing you’re surrounded by the very people the movie is all about.

I’m sure I’d feel differently if I were watching “Hostel 2,” but sitting at Carmike Cinema 12 last Friday, experiencing the glorious joke on America that is “Borat,” I must say I found it rather transporting. Infuriating would be another word, but I’m trying to cast this in a positive light.

Onscreen, Borat, played with one hell of a poker face by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, is taking a ride with three wasted fratboys. Now, I don’t know if they were actually members of a fraternity, but for the sake of argument, let’s just say that a fratboy is anybody who wears flip-flops, a backward hat and a short--sleeved polo, is a philistine, and did I mention the backward hat? Well, let’s also include sideways hats and any kind of visor, as well.

Anyway, Borat’s in the middle of bringing out these idiots’ true selves, which includes blatantly sexist and racist comments (one of them says that slavery ought to be brought back, while another asserts that women are just for sex, and not calling afterward), when all of a sudden it hits me: People exactly like those on screen are surrounding me in the theater.

Those two chemical biologists behind me who dissed the preview for “The Fountain,” then commented on how funny “Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj” looked? They probably wish slaves would press play on their “Girls Gone Wild: First Timers” DVD at home. The two guys swigging cheap beer next to me? They’re probably trying to figure out how to get their grubby hands on some GHB.

“Borat” is, as all the critics have been saying, one of the funniest movies of the year. But watching it’s also a deeply disturbing experience. It’s difficult to transition, for instance, between the hilarity of two naked and extremely hirsute men chasing each other through a hotel, and a scene where Borat interviews a frighteningly dumb hick, who says that gay people should be lynched.

Similarly, when Borat attends a religious happening in the deep South where participants swoon and speak in tongues as their leader rails against evolution, I chuckled until I realized, “Oh, man, these are the people leading our country right now!”

Religious fundamentalists are only funny as long as nobody gives them any sharp or explosive objects to play with, or votes concerning women’s reproductive freedom. At that point, the joke is over.

Of course, the joke was over about six years ago, and yet in some ways, it will never be over. The only way to rise above the kind of ignorance America seems to be filled with these days is to laugh about it. By forcing us to laugh at ourselves, “Borat” succeeds in helping some of us to stomach the ongoing atrocities against culture, politics, philosophy and even fashion we witness every day.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if everybody in that theater realized we were laughing at ourselves. Or were they just sitting there, thinking how stupid those “other people on the screen” looked as Borat made fun of them.

If that’s the case, then I guess the joke is on them, which means the joke is on me, too, because I have to continue to see them stumble at top volume by my house on Thirsty Thursday nights. I have to continue to watch them propping up some scantily clad woman, and wonder whether she’s sober enough to give consent.

Truth is, the joke’s on all of us, and in the wake of making a movie that holds a mirror up to show us the brutality of what our society has become, perhaps the only one entitled to laugh is Borat.

Jake TenPas can be reached at jake.tenpas@lee.net or 758-9514.