Word: cohen
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...find sources for Baron Cohen's comic method in a lot of places. He's a great fan of Peter Sellers, and one Sellers role in particular hovers over everything Baron Cohen does - Chance the Gardener, the blank slate in Being There who provokes all those around him to expose themselves in some way. And then there's the other comic who was routinely described as a performance artist: Andy Kaufman. For starters, Borat owes a thing or two to Latka, the Ruritanian innocent that Kaufman played on Taxi. More important, Baron Cohen's approach calls to mind those Kaufman...
...Kaufman reserved his passive aggression for audiences, who because they were audiences were already primed for a performance of some kind, even if they didn't always get the joke. Baron Cohen takes his act out into the wider world, all for the fun of proving what fools these mortals be. That includes the mortals called Ali G, Borat and Brüno - Baron Cohen's comic characters are as dumb and deplorable as the people they mock. Ali G is a self-deluding white guy who yearns to be a black rapper. Borat is a rube and an anti...
...could be looked at as the third in a trilogy of films that Baron Cohen has devoted to each of the three characters he developed first on British television and then on HBO. Though Ali G Indahouse was a hit in the U.K., it went straight to video in the U.S. Borat was, of course, a global cultural and box-office phenomenon, except maybe in Kazakhstan, where some people got a bit sniffy. Both characters are too famous now for Baron Cohen to use them anymore as a lure for the unsuspecting. Before the summer...
Early work by positive psychologists had established intriguing correlations between happiness or optimism and factors like wealth, marriage, health and longevity, but there was little in the way of rigorous science to explain these associations. Now that's beginning to change. At Carnegie Mellon, for instance, psychologist Sheldon Cohen has been exploring exactly how positive emotions affect the body. (This is the flip side of previous work by Cohen and others linking stress, Type-A behavior and negative emotions to lowered immunity, heart disease and shorter lifespan.) Cohen's research shows that people with a "positive emotional style" have better...
...Cohen and his colleagues have also been studying how social relationships and positive emotions can impact lifespan. Their work builds on a famous 2001 University of Kentucky study of aging nuns, which found that the more positive emotions the nuns had expressed in brief autobiographies written 60 years earlier at age 22, the longer they lived. In an interesting twist on that study, Cohen and colleague Sarah Pressman similarly analyzed a collection of autobiographies - this time, written by 96 leading psychologists at an average age of 65. Once again, there was a correlation between longevity and positive emotions...