I live in a similar shitty post soviet country, the kazakh scenes were filmed in romania, and noone finds it offensive here, even Kazakhstan uses the slogan “very nice” nowadays.
It’s an interesting case. Most of the movie is Cohen doing patently ridiculous things to an audience who just go “Welp, foreigners sure are weird.” The joke is mostly on the people who are willing to believe that Borat is an accurate representation of what Kazakh people are like.
Yeah, as always with these things, it depends on which party is being made fun of. Like In Tropic Thunder, RDJ’s black face doesn’t make fun of black people, but of Hollywood actors who do ridiculous things for the sake of method acting, so it doesn’t become a racist joke.
Exactly, the joke they are making is simply not racist in nature. At the same time, the idea that using blackface to make a joke about entrenched Hollywood racism trivializes the harm of using blackface isn’t unreasonable. It’s a layered issue, people can land in different places. Ultimately though, the controversy over Tropic Thunder, then and now, being so minimal does indicate that for most viewers, the joke justified itself.
Some more good ones:
Oh no, some of those feel like the wrong thing was cue’d up for some reason. But accidentally playing a fake song from Borat is brutal.
Commenting to say how again was Borat so wildly accepted but if it was the other way around it’s racism
Wdym? Please explain.
I live in a similar shitty post soviet country, the kazakh scenes were filmed in romania, and noone finds it offensive here, even Kazakhstan uses the slogan “very nice” nowadays.
It’s an interesting case. Most of the movie is Cohen doing patently ridiculous things to an audience who just go “Welp, foreigners sure are weird.” The joke is mostly on the people who are willing to believe that Borat is an accurate representation of what Kazakh people are like.
Yeah, as always with these things, it depends on which party is being made fun of. Like In Tropic Thunder, RDJ’s black face doesn’t make fun of black people, but of Hollywood actors who do ridiculous things for the sake of method acting, so it doesn’t become a racist joke.
Exactly, the joke they are making is simply not racist in nature. At the same time, the idea that using blackface to make a joke about entrenched Hollywood racism trivializes the harm of using blackface isn’t unreasonable. It’s a layered issue, people can land in different places. Ultimately though, the controversy over Tropic Thunder, then and now, being so minimal does indicate that for most viewers, the joke justified itself.
Borat is explicitly racist, on purpose. It’s just that he is mocking the racists, not the race he is portraying.