Borat is a character known for two things, shock humor and creating a generation of people who think quoting someone funny counts as having a sense of humor. Curiously, one of the groups of people Borat shits on the hardest think he’s fucking hilarious because he’s quite literally speaking their language.
We’re of course talking about Jewish people, or as Borat and people on Reddit could say “The Jews”. During his various appearances in movies and TV shows Borat has accused Jewish people of being shape-shifting monsters who eat children and sung a song in front of a shockingly okay with being-all-fucking-kinds-of-racist crowd simply titled, Throw The Jew Down The Well. A song that get this, a crowd in Texas (because where else would this happen but Texas?) sang along with and applauded when it finished.
Borat, as a character is so shockingly racist towards Jewish people that you’d expect any reasonable Jewish person seeing or hearing anything he said to be appalled and for the most part, a lot are, that is until they hear him speak “Kazakh”, Borat’s supposed native language. You see, despite introducing himself as being from Kazakhstan, which the actual Kazakhstan government fucking hate by the way, the actor who plays Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen, doesn’t speak a word of the Kazakh language. He does however speak perfect Hebrew. Because, yeah, Cohen is Jewish.
To be clear, we don’t mean that Cohen is like a little bit Jewish or something, we mean he’s super Jewish. Along with being fluent in Hebrew, Cohen spent a year in Israel following his graduation from University and even joined a number of special Jew clubs when he was at school. Which begs the question, why in the holy-titting fuck would he dress up as a character who typifies the kind of ignorant dipshit who thinks his race is inferior? In Cohen’s own silky smooth words, he created the character as a deliberate mockery of the kind of people who hold views like Borat. In essence Borat is supposed to make anti-semetic people look stupid by making it so that anyone who makes a derogatory comment about Jewish people is automatically associated with a guy who looks like this …
By making the character as ridiculous as possible, it makes his ideas seems just as ridiculous, in effect weakening the kind of impact they can have on a person. It’s for this reason that Cohen also frequently speaks Hebrew while portraying the character, so that Jewish people watching or listening can be in on the joke. Since we don’t speak Hebrew ourselves, we don’t have a definitive list of all the things he’s said under the guise of screaming explitives in Kazakh, but people who can speak the language have noted that Cohen seems to particularly enjoy verbally tearing people he speaks to a new asshole in Hebrew just because he can. Which to be fair, is exactly what we’d do if we could speak a language nobody in the immediate vicinity could understand.
