Nothing new* in the Telegraph article about Borat, except this. Sascha Baron Cohen was a member of Footlights, the drama club at Cambridge. The link will take you to the complete list of members, but the gods of British comedy were all there, not to mention they met at Footlights and began their brillant careers together there: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, the Monty Pythoners, Douglas Adams, Emma Thompson.

The Wikkipedia entry on Cohen claims:

Contrary to popular myth, Sacha Baron Cohen never appeared in a Cambridge Footlights Review.

However, the Footlights website lists him in their blurb as one of their famous alumnae. However apparently he wasn’t involved in the summer shows. Look at the deep investigative reporting KZBlog is willing to go to to get to the heart of controversial issues in Kazakhstan today.

* Sean Roberts has already covered the way it’s being spun as if Nazarbayev and Bush are meeting specifically to discuss Borat, which I thought was the funnest development thus far

Dear Kazakhstan

I understand. I really do. I don’t think he’s funny. I’m tired of defending my adopted country and that of my wife and friends against ignorant idiots who believe the crap this idiot spews out.

But really, this furor is making you look worse than anything Borat has ever done or said. It’s one thing for people to laugh about funny customs they think you have, but it’s another to come off as a humourless, repressive government, especially given your associations with the mother of all humourless, repressive dictatorships, the USSR.

Look, the people who read The New York Times and the Washington Post, where you place ads, already know about Kazakhstan. They get the joke of Borat and how it’s not about Kazakhstan for reals.

However one large, educated and influential sector of the population reads blogs and web pages. And on those blogs, on the eve of your President’s trip to the US, the first such trip in years, after a succession of high-level visits from the US to Kazakhstan including Condoleezza Rice, Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, they are not talking about you recent success negotiating a nuclear weapon free zone. They are not talking about your attempts to advise Iran on nuclear weapons. Nor do they mention controversial, but serious, issues like recent media law reforms or the court case that concluded. No word about the World Conference on Religions, going on right now with the participation of Gorbachev and the former President of Iran not to mention representatives of every religious group ever. They are talking about Borat. From what angle? Not from yours.

Please stop. You aren’t winning. Please watch some American TV and movies. Note that the lone individual, thought to be a little wacky, but ultimately funny, always wins over the giant faceless bureaucracy, whether the genre be drama, romance, historical drama or comedy. In tragedy, the bureaucracy wins–but that IS the tragedy.

Borat is one guy who will someday die and the DVDs of his movies will fade in 15-20 years according to the experts. Your culture has survived for thousands of years. The nomadic lifestyle helped build two of the greatest and largest empires the world has ever seen. You win.

Love,

KZBlog

Borat first came to my attention when a Kazakh friend of mine was asked, very apologetically, if she had heard of him. She hadn’t and the guy sent her an article from the New Yorker from the Kazakh Embassy in Washington. My reaction then was probably typical of most Americans: What’s the big deal? This guy is yet another in a long line of shock-comics. I’ve never found this sort of thing funny but it was obvious he had no connection to Kazakhstan and it wasn’t clear where the harm was. I was slightly amused by the fact that Vassilenko, the Embassy spokesperson was reluctant to admit that one of the traditional sports of Kazakhstan, kokpar, involves using a headless goat or sheep carcass as a ball. It has been noted that Kazakhstan as a nation wants desperately to be taken seriously, however trying to disown genuine traditions is not necessarily the best path to that. There is no shame in Janybek never having closed negotiations for a joint venture with Adidas in the 16th century.

Borat returned to my attention after I had spent a year in Kazakhstan, and was at a housewarming party. Two guys started asking me if I had heard of Borat and if what he said was true. I told them it wasn’t in any way based on truth but they insisted that he wouldn’t have named Kazakhstan and just made everything up. I explained that the joke apparently was on ignorant Westerners willing to believe that other nations are primitive. One of them pointed out that the USSR was known to be anti-Semitic (this was after this Borat stunt) and Kazakhstan probably was too. I pointed out that half the world had a history of anti-Semitism. They pressed—granted we were at a party and drinking and all that. I began to get annoyed, especially when they pressed on the question of women and how Borat’s “traditional” costumes were very revealing and how could it then be that traditional Kazakh dress is very modest? Surely, Kazakh women were sluts. (more…)