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Kazakhstan, Reversing Itself, Embraces ‘Borat’ as Very Nice (Published 2020)
After banning the first Sacha Baron Cohen satire, the country has created tourism ads adopting its catchphrase.
After banning the first Sacha Baron Cohen satire, the country has created tourism ads adopting its catchphrase.
In 2005, Dennis Keen, a high school junior in Los Angeles, was applying for a summer exchange program. After not much deliberation, he decided it would be punky and funny to forgo France and Spain and go to Kazakhstan. “People didn’t know where it was,” Mr. Keen said. “In Kazakhstan, there’s pre-Borat and post-Borat.”
He was referring, of course, to “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the Sacha Baron Cohen comedy that hit theaters a year later, in 2006. In the movie, Mr. Cohen pretends to be a television reporter visiting America from the former Soviet republic, whose people supposedly drink horse urine, consider women property and celebrate an anti-Semitic version of the running of the bulls. (The bulls are replaced by Jews.) The authoritarian Kazakh government banned the film, threatened to sue Mr. Cohen and took out a four-page advertisement in this newspaper defending the country’s honor.
And so when Mr. Cohen released a trailer on Sept. 29 for a “Borat” sequel, which he developed in secret and which debuted on Friday on Amazon, the satirist was prepared for another fight with the Kazakh government.
It never came. “It was like, ‘Oh, again?’” said Kairat Sadvakassov, the deputy chairman of Kazakhstan’s tourism board, who has a master’s degree in tourism management from New York University. The board was determined to avoid overreacting and letting Mr. Cohen make it look foolish once again. “The decision was made to let it die its natural death and not respond,” Mr. Sadvakassov said.
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