[Download] "Borat As Tragicomedy of Anti Us-Americanism (Critical Essay)" by CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Borat As Tragicomedy of Anti Us-Americanism (Critical Essay)
- Author : CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 84 KB
Description
Lenny Bruce, a pent-up U.S. comic of the 1950s and 1960s, once noted that "The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it ... try to fake three laughs in an hour--ha ha ha ha ha--they'll take you away, man. You can't" (Bruce http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/lenny_bruce.html ). Sacha Baron Cohen is certainly a talented comedian whose work echoes both outrageously hilarious Jewish humor originating from such hubs of global Jewish culture as Odessa, Ukraine, or New York and, strangely enough, such lost or thoroughly forgotten traditions as that of the bold "pent-up comics" of the 1950s to the early 1960s in the U.S. For example, Bruce with his poignant satire of U.S. society comes to mind instantly as a possible important progenitor: Borat's rodeo performance on the Iraq War strikes me as vintage Lenny. And yet this feature film leaves one with an eerie feeling of sadness and melancholia. Were he still alive, the sick comic Bruce would most certainly approve of Borat. After all, maybe Socrates was right when at the end of the huge drinking party in the Symposium he explained to his cronies that an author of good comedy is somehow simultaneously a tragedian and vice versa. Certain episodes of Borat may signal the advent of a new, post-Cold War epoch of infallible black humor, the black humor of the unipolar, U.S.-run world, the humor that causes a bitter smile, some sort of laughter through tears: for now I will only give an example of the touching scene in the car after Borat and the Black sex worker Luenell are thrown out of a Southern white home (the white U.S. South's idea of etiquette of good manners is thus brilliantly mocked). In what is arguably the most piquantly uneasy episode of the whole film, a visibly embarrassed Borat tells the woman he is sorry--and thus the irony: presumably, it takes a British comedian to apologize to her on the behalf of the whole white population of the U.S. South!