Sunday 23 December 2007

Goodbye Ali G & Borat

Sacha Baron Cohen, the talented actor behind his lauded and awarded comic creations of Borat and Ali G, is saying goodbye to them.

He became a comedy superstar as Borat, the outrageously anti-Semitic, homophobic reporter from Kazakhstan where he became a cultural icon lampooning and offending virtually anyone.

The wannabe-gangsta-rapper Ali G humiliated people he interviewed.

Cohen has announced that due to having become too familiar to the public, the characters of Borat and Ali G will be retired.
"When I was being Ali G and Borat I was in character sometimes 14 hours a day and I came to love them, so admitting I am never going to play them again is quite a sad thing," he told the Telegraph in London.
"It is like saying goodbye to a loved one. It is hard, and the problem with success, although it's fantastic, is that every new person who sees the Borat movie is one less person I 'get' with Borat again, so it's a kind of self-defeating form, really."

"It's upsetting, but the success has been great and better than anything I could have dreamed of."
Cohen has had some troubles due of racist or prejudiced comments his characters make. His characters deliver an obvious satire that exposes people's ignorance and prejudice. A great deal of humour uses this premise.
The anti-Semitic Borat, Cohen says the segments are a "dramatic demonstration of how racism feeds on dumb conformity, as much as rabid bigotry," rather than a display of racism by Baron Cohen himself. "Borat essentially works as a tool. By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudice," he says.
"I think that's quite an interesting thing with Borat, which is people really let down their guard with him because they're in a room with somebody who seems to have these outrageous opinions. They sometimes feel much more relaxed about letting their own outrageous, politically incorrect, prejudiced opinions come out."
Cohen, the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, says he also wishes in particular to expose the role of indifference in the genocide. "When I was in university, there was a major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw, who said, 'The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.' I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic."
He attended Christ's College at the University of Cambridge where he studied history and wrote his thesis on Jewish involvement in the American Civil Rights movement.
'We should not be afraid of humour and we shouldn't try to control everything' he said. (read hello Kevin Byrne).
Following a number of public attacks at the his awkward comedy, the deputy foreign minister of Kazakhstan recently invited Baron Cohen to visit the country, stating that he could learn that 'women drive cars, wine is made of grapes, and Jews are free to go to synagogues.'
In the Borat movie, two University of South Carolina students who appear sued the filmmakers, alleging that they were tricked into signing release forms while drunk, and that false promises were made that the footage was for a documentary that would never be screened in the USA.
However, a Los Angeles judge denied the pair a restraining order to remove them from the film and the lawsuit was dismissed.
Coen is engaged to Aussie actress Isla Fisher, and will wed in a traditional Jewish ceremony. In October, Fisher gave birth to a baby girl.
RIP Borat and Ali G.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I for one would be delighted never to see or hear this boorish creep again.

The first time I saw him, I thought he was amusing.

Then I realized this was a comedian who routinely makes fun out of Muslims and portrays them as idiotic bigots in a sneaky, underhand and very repetitive way.

Imagine a Muslim British comedian who dressed up as a Jew and put vicious, over the top anti-Muslim jokes into the lips of that character, making Jews look bad and mad.

I doubt such a program would get through BBC editorial filters to the first show. If it did, it wouldn’t last long on air. There would be howls of protest from the organized Jewish lobby, with claims that the BBC was allowing Jewish people to be parodied. I might well have some sympathy for their complaints.

Yet Mr Cohen gets carte blanche to purvey his bigoted, partisan filth – and the British and Australian media lap it up.

Yeah, I’ve had a few titters out of Ali G, but even that character, for me, became shallow over time. I thought his interview with Ralph Nader, for example, was an embarrassment. His lack of good humored humanity stands out when he meets someone of substance.

canard_du_jour said...

It is with great sadness that I hear about the end of Borat. I am not sad about not hearing the same lame jokes again, rather I am sad that he will never get a chance to try playing a "joke" on me using a bag of human excrement as a prop. God, I so used to dream of knocking that filthy dog's teeth out and shoving his stinking excrement down his dirty little throat. I am also sad that nobody at the dinner party where he played this hilarious prank had the gumption to at least try to do the same. I'm no prude but the fact that a lot of people seemed to find this puerile garbage funny makes me sad for western "society" as a whole.
And don't get me started on that "jackass" piece of shit...