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Comment by abhinav22 | Hacker News Reader

Borat made some very racist and inaccurate remarks about country (Kazakhstan) who did nothing to deserve such humiliation. As a foreigner I did not appreciate the crass of the movie at the time, but I understand completely why there is so much backlash against it. Calling something “satire” doesn’t give you a free license to be rude, especially towards other cultures who don’t share your form of self degrading humor that sometimes us in the West laugh and enjoy.

Source: My partner is Kazakh.

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Yeah, while the movie made me laugh, the old "people from abroad are stupid because they don't speak English well" stereotype is really tired.

The one redeeming quality the movie had was that it usually got its laughs from people's reactions to Borat, not from Borat actually being a dumb foreigner.

The stereotype is tired because xenophobia is tiring. By taking on that stereotype to a ridiculous extreme it shows the difference between people who are willing and able to discern a prank when it fits their xenophobic worldviews and those who are not (or do not have xenophobic worldviews). It’s a direct attack against prejudiced people by making an example of them in a Hollywood movie.

Most of it was, but some of it was just "aren't foreigners weird", like the scene where they ran naked through the hotel.

No, Borat wasn’t always unmasking xenophobia, but often just playing for pure laughs. Think of the old Borat sketches where Borat asks if he can squeeze an Americans man’s testicles to see how large they are compared to his own. Are we to assume that anyone who would go along with that, who wouldn’t identify the prank, is xenophobic? Not at all. I think that many people who were actually appreciative of the diversity of the cultures of the world (and who maybe grew up reading National Geographic with its discussions of things like Papuan New Guinea penis sheaths) might think, well, maybe that is considered normal in Kazakhstan.

I think that the subject of the satire for most of the movie is intended to be American's perception of foreigners, and not foreigners themselves. I do agree that some of the depictions of Kazakhstan (the village in the movie is not actually even in Kazakhstan) do veer away from this toward something that at least feels like it is poking fun at the depicted culture and not Americans.

Satire is nice and all but most people will not really engage with satire enough to understand that it is satire.

If it makes you or your partner happier: Cohen (in both films) is a lot harder on real America than fake Kazakhstan.

> Source: My partner is Kazakh.

This isn't reddit. You don't need to defend your opinion.

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