I laughed till my face hurt. Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" is funny. I'd never seen his "Da Ali G Show" so on the way back from the movie I rented the DVDs. After watching them I felt like a French peasant who has enjoyed the public guillotining of two or three aristocrats but is sickened and bored after watching the fifth or sixth-hundredth beheading of his neighbors.
Cohen's "shtick" consists of his alter egos---Ali G, a very white "black" British TV host, Borat, a "Kazakhstani" TV narrator, and Brüno, a "gay Austrian" TV host---roaming the world making fools of everyone. Gay fashion commentators, a wrestling team, political and media figures, ordinary voters, dance class participants, churchgoers and lots of just plain folks get hit below the belt. So do bewildered rural villagers who obviously had no idea what they were participating in. Poverty is hilarious!
Since "Borat" is a top-earning film let's anticipate "Borat II" and endless seasons of "Ali G."
I have a hunch about why the "Jackass" movies and now "Borat" are such hits. Maybe it has to do with a generation that's been told to be nice once too often. Maybe they've heard the words "Good job!" too often as well.
The earnest unrelenting attention of teachers and parents trained to inculcate sensitivity has turned toxic. So has an education system where everyone is an "A student." Our post, post 60s generation has come of age fed on a steady diet of be-nice piety, diversity, respect for all points of view and most of all self-esteem for no reason. Everybody is a winner! And the "winners" are sick of it.
If you teach religious mythology as truth (even when it's dressed up as a secular piety) sooner or later some atheist will pop the bubble. With every screamed laugh the hordes of young men and women possessed of a toxic sense of humor are taking revenge on the be-nice pieties of the age.
There is no such thing as off-limits. What we see now is terminal irony digesting itself.
To the Cohen's of the world stupid people (in other words all we ordinary folks going about our business) serve only one purpose: to be brought low for the amusement of the-all-knowing mob. But this score settling with normality is cowardly. Polite southern fundamentalists are fair game but Cohen didn't go to Mecca and interview pilgrims about the sex life of Muhammad or run naked down the streets of Medina.
After watching "Borat" and Ali G's antics, I marvel at the restraint of my fellow Americans. We seem to have an almost limitless reserve of good will and tolerance for strangers, even ones ready to figuratively and/or actually crap on us. Maybe the message of the painfully earnest politically-correct proselytizers has sunk in after all. Cohen-The-Barbarian got into and out of America alive. We sure seem to be very nice people.
Maybe someday we'll tire of the public execution of human dignity sold as humor. Or perhaps grownups will show up and ask why a wealthy British comic gets to rove the world making fools of ordinary people, including impoverished illiterate rural peasants who's only crime is that they aren't as cool, rich and ironic as Cohen.
For now we're still laughing. But (at least judging by the theater I was in) a lot of that laughter is nervous. It should be.