The First Post - Borat, Nazarbayev and da House

When Kazakhstan’s democracy-shy president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, makes his stately progress to meet President Bush at the White House today, he may catch a glimpse of an ill-dressed television reporter vigorously protesting the rudeness of the British actor and comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen.

Of course, the man in question is Cohen himself, creator of Ali G, in the guise of his notoriously tiresome character, Borat, a Kazakh journalist who has come to America to report on local customs back home. …

While regular Kazakhs are unfazed by Cohen’s depiction of their country, it’s easy to see why the official line is ‘not amused’. Borat depicts a “hole” of a country whose national delicacy is mare’s milk, and whose cultural idiosyncracies include “the running of the Jew”, a variation on Pamplona’s bull-running. Borat introduces the audience to his sister, “number four prostitute in whole of Kazakhstan”.

Choosing to mock Kazakhstan was a superb comic choice. It’s established enough to afford the luxury of being deeply offended. In the next decade it will become one of the world’s largest oil producersand courted like a debutante by the Russians, Chinese and Americans. Dollars, of course, win the hearts of tarts and the Kazakhs have acquiesced to US pressure to route a new multi-billion-dollar oil pipeline to the Black Sea through their country (and away from China, a traditional enemy, and Russia, Kazakhstan’s former master).

The number of senior US officials paying visits to Kazakhstan is a measure of how much the White House values the president of a strategically-placed, oil-wealthy, al-Qaeda-free central Asian state.

This is very funny. Apparently he won’t come out of character at all, not even for Vanity Fair.

Date: Sep 28th, 2006 · Comments RSS · Tags: Entertainment