Word: borat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There's a legendary moment in Borat when you stop laughing and move on to a sort of desperate, horrified gasping because what you're seeing is, literally, beyond funny. That moment, of course, is the nude wrestling match between Borat, a hairy beanpole of a broadcaster from Kazakhstan, and his producer, a mountain of bearded blubber. When you're presented with a sight like that - the most purely awful spectacle since Divine sampled dog poop at the end of John Waters' Pink Flamingos - something more than mere laughter is required. Like maybe a call...
...record, Brüno, like Borat, was directed by Larry Charles. And as with Borat, the story in Brüno is just the merest pretext for stringing together provocations. At the beginning, Brüno is the hip-cocking host of Funkyzeit, a late-night Austrian TV show that tours the world of style. When he wrecks a runway show and ends up shunned by the Euro-fashion crowd, he lights out for the Middle East, Africa and the U.S. to become "the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler." At which point Brüno becomes, again like Borat...
...Still, Central Asia exists on the periphery for most policy makers in the U.S. When not the illusory realm of Borat or an exotic waypoint of horse markets and mutton skewers, the region has been cast off as a dysfunctional Russian annex, easily manipulated by a Kremlin that still views these young republics as satellite states. From Ashgabat to Astana, the ruling elites are all holdovers from the Soviet era, and sometimes more fluent in Russian than their national tongues. "Their regimes operate," says Eric McGlinchey, a Central Asia specialist and professor of politics and government at George Mason University...
...development wreaked more havoc on Eminem's hateability than all the rest: amazingly, someone coarsened the culture without him. As Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen advanced the art of provocation, broadening it from Eminem's preferred taboos of sex and class to the mocking of all Americans (by a foreigner, no less) for being naive enough to believe their own mythology. Baron Cohen was darker, funnier and way more misanthropic than Eminem - which is how it goes with cultural instigators. They poke, we react; they poke again, we react a little less, until eventually someone with a sharper stick...
...fair, foreign media sometimes exaggerate the incidents. Calling out to the American President in front of Queen Elizabeth II, after the official photo op at the G-20 in London ("Mr. Obamaaa! I'm Mr. Berlusconi!") was a lovely Borat moment - harmless, and quite funny. Talking on his mobile while Angela Merkel was waiting for him at the NATO summit? He was just showing off ("I can convince Turkish leader Erdogan to accept Rasmussen as head at NATO. Leave it to me, guys.") And when he told earthquake victims in Abruzzo to think of their situation "like a weekend...