Borat

That's the name of the reporter that Sasha Baron Cohen plays in his comedic sketches I mentioned earlier. I came across a NY Times article about him today. In hindsight, I'd say he should have used a fake country as his target, but he's still my favorite current comedian.

BTW, his movie is coming out in November!



September 28, 2006
Kazakhs Shrug at ‘Borat’ While the State Fumes
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
ASTANA, Kazakhstan, Sept. 26 — There is no Running of the Jews here. No one greets you with the expression “Jagshemash,” which is either nonsense, garbled Polish or mangled Czech; it’s hard to say. The country’s national drink is not made from horse urine, though fermented horse milk, or kumys, is considered a delicacy. (It tastes like effervescent yogurt.)

There is almost nothing, in short, remotely truthful in the satiric depiction of Kazakhstan popularized by Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedian who plays a bumbling, boorish, anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic Kazakh television reporter named Borat Sagdiyev.

And yet Borat — Mr. Cohen, that is — has managed to infuriate and confound the country’s officials. Their attempts to respond, to set the record straight, have resulted only in more attention here, where Borat’s antics, shown on British and American television and on the Internet, now make the rounds like samizdat from the long-gone days when the country was part of the Soviet Union.
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