Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Expat Village is edited and published by Iain Williams in Caracas, Venezuela.

A Daily Telegraph article by Christopher Howse at  www.telegraph.co.uk

Borat kissed the man from the BBC on both cheeks and denounced, as "lies from Uzbekistan", the advertisements in newspapers claiming that women in Kazakhstan had equal rights.

After the in-character interview in the West End of London, the news presenter back in the studio laughed. She just couldn't help it, she said.

Figure of fun: Sacha Baron Cohen in character as Kazakh reporter Borat

Sacha Baron Cohen is getting good publicity for his film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. It's nothing to do with Kazakhstan, we know. Village scenes were filmed in Romania, and Borat speaks not bits of Kazakh but Hebrew, punctuated by a Slavonic-sounding "Jagshemash!"

Just one problem (apart from the film being too long) – isn't Borat, the movie, anti-Semitic? It can't be, some reply: Baron Cohen is Jewish himself. But I don't mean that he is anti-Semitic, rather that the effect of the film will be to increase anti-Semitism.

When Borat says that Kazakhstan has changed, because "homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats," we laugh, but not at homosexuals.

When he was in America for advance publicity for the film, in character, he remarked, "I would like to meet the fearless anti-Jew warrior, Melvin Gibson." That's a joke against poor Mel, of course. But how much postmodernist irony can we consume before we begin to swallow straight the lines that say the opposite of what is meant?

It is surprising how far some Jewish people are going not to be offended by the film. After a screening at the Haifa Film Festival, people got up and cheered.

"To me, as a Jewish person, what he did was subversive," says Naomi Alderman, the prize-wining novelist, "because while he was saying all these things about Jews, he was talking in Hebrew. It felt like he was turning to every Jewish person watching and going wink, wink, 'It's all right, I don't really mean any of this'."

No, of course he doesn't. But the words remain, and so does the character who says them. It is instructive to compare Borat Sagdiyev with Ali G, the character that made Sacha Baron Cohen famous.

It only seems yesterday that I was writing in these pages about how funny he was, and people were saying "Who?" That was because seven or eight years ago Ali G featured obscurely on a forgotten programme called The 11 O'Clock Show, ideal for people coming back from the pub.

We laughed because Ali G mocked interviewees. To Tony Benn he said: "Me want to work when me want to, but most de time me want to chill, me want to hang with me bitches..." To which Benn replied earnestly: "You do treat women with a great deal of disrespect... You don't want to work, you call women bitches and then you're asking me about a society that's happy!"

Ali G was also satirising his own persona (said to be influenced by the absurd DJ and bishop's son, Tim Westwood, who on the radio uses a Jamaican dialect). We viewers knew that swaggering patois-mouthed wannabe gangstas were absurd, but we were frightened of laughing at them in the street. On the telly from the safety of the sofa we could laugh at them vicariously, via Ali G, and no one need ever know.

The same could be said of the targets he attacks in his latest film. In one scene in the film, Borat asks the man behind the counter in a gun shop: "Which gun would be best to shoot the Jews?" The man recommends a 9mm pistol.

Here Baron Cohen is revisiting the most controversial territory he covered in the television series, Borat's Guide to the USA. At a country and western club in Tucson, Arizona, Borat sings his party piece for the cowboy-hatted and booted audience.

At first, it seems just to be an embarrassing "Kazakh" song about mechanised transport, but then Borat gets the folks singing the chorus along with him. They sing: "Throw the Jew down the well,/ So my country can be free./ You must grab him by his horns, / Then we have a big party."

Some of the country fans looked shamefaced. Others sang with gusto. Perhaps they hated Jews. Perhaps they didn't care about "inappropriate" behaviour. If this is a mirror held up to modern America, it shows an ugly image.

Sacha Baron Cohen is the modern heir of scriptwriter Johnny Speight, who satirised the foul-mouthed racialist bigot Alf Garnett. Of course, the danger is that, just as people came to love Alf, so in the United States, and perhaps Britain, too, Borat's outlook will become the viewer's.

But I'm confident it won't. Borat, like Alf Garnett, is very funny. So let's not panic. We can still tell the difference between a joke and a beerhall putsch. Can't we?

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Sukhdev Sandhu's review of 'Borat' found in the Daily telegraph at www.telegraph.co.uk

Borat (15 cert, 83 min)

Perhaps you'll laugh at the subtitle: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Perhaps you'll laugh at the opening credits: a grab-bag of public-information-film graphics and sputtering newsreels from an inept cable-network show.

Baron Cohen's film is an incredibly brave piece of guerrilla investigative journalism

The only guarantee for anyone who sees Borat is that once you start laughing, it will be impossible to stop. Kids who can't recite a line of poetry will be reeling off the entire script within days.

This is the people's film of 2006. It starts with Borat leaving his Kazakhstani village to shoot a documentary about America. It's goodbye to his bear of a wife, his prostitute sister, the kindergarten overrun with Kalashnikov wielding infants and the annual Running of the Jew event in which an inflated claw-fisted Semite moves through the town square before laying a "Jew egg" that kids try to smash.

Off he goes, accompanied only by his producer Azamat (Ken Davitian), a live hen in his suitcase and a jar of gypsy tears to protect him from Aids. He arrives in New York a mustachioed midnight cowboy.

He washes his pants at a Central Park lake, defecates behind a bush in front of a Plaza building, and addresses girls he passes on the street with: "Very nice. How much?"

He's also obsessed with Pamela Anderson – and sets off in an ice-cream van to travel the country to find and marry her. On the way, he shows Polaroids of his young son's penis to the members of a respectable Southern dining society and performs a mangled rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner in front of a rodeo audience to whose cheers he announces: "We support your war of terror – may George Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq."

It's impossible to summarise every comic encounter that Sacha Baron Cohen, assisted by writers Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham and Dan Mazer, have tugged out of their demented, inventive minds.

Seeing a Barbie doll at a yard sale of a woman whom he's convinced is a gipsy, Borat demands: "Who is this lady you have shrunk?" Seeing a couple of cockroaches on the floor of a Jewish-run guesthouse, he shrieks: "Look! The Jews have shifted their shapes!"

Borat's profanity and racism are so over the top that they become absurdly funny. They also reveal a side of his interviewees they must now regret: a Neanderthal pack of boys wish that slavery could be re-legalised in the US.

Make no mistake, Borat is an incredibly brave piece of guerrilla investigative journalism. Consider the risks: a skinny white Cambridge graduate goes undercover into redneck country with the express goal of riling its pistol-packing locals. The only possible protection he has from his subjects is his accent.

Oscar voters rarely reward comedy, but if there's any justice Baron Cohen will at least bag a nomination for best actor. He is fearless, improvisatory and never giggles – even when describing to slack-jawed Americans how the women of Kazakhstan are kept in cages. It is a masterful performance, and this is a wonderful film.

This review is by Sukhdev Sandhu

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