This is off-topic (except to the extent that it exposes my taste in humour), but Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan premieres this Friday (if you live in the U.S.A.)! I have been a fan since a Kiwi friend of mine turned me on to him, about five years ago. Be sure to see it, or at least find out what you have been missing. You can “befrend” him on “myspaces”, or watch his idol Korki Buchek perform Bing Bang.

The only people who are not laughing are the poor Kazakhs. They were so concerned that they took out a four-page color ad in the New York Times and commissioned a promotional video. A news article estimates the cost of the insert to be $300,000-$400,000. Given that the GDP per capita income is $8,300 (for 2005, and coincidentally the same as Turkey), approximately fifty people had to give up their year’s earnings. I did not expect to be entertained at Kazakhstan’s expense literally. You might say that taking out an ad was a foolish thing to do, that the average viewer is bright enough to realize that Kazakhstan was adopted as Borat’s nationality simply because most people are not familiar with it. However, when people only hear negative things about a country (even in jest), it is difficult for them to form a positive opinion, if they can form any opinion at all. The same thing happened in Turkey three decades ago when Alan Parker directed Midnight Express, expect that time it was not meant as a joke. The prison system has since been reformed, under pressure from the E.U., but the film exacted its toll in many years of curbed tourism.

Baron Cohen claims that he based the character on a Russian doctor he once met, but Borat bears an uncanny resemblance to the Turkish Internet celebrity Mahir Çağrı. I wonder what Turkey’s response would have been if Turkey had been substituted for Kazakhstan? Probably the same as Kazakhstan’s!

Reviews: NYT, New Yorker, Salon, BBC (audio).