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There hasn't been a comedy this edgy in a long time. And there certainly hasn't been one that the comedy élite is this excited by. After seeing an early screening, Curb Your Enthusiasm creator Larry David jokingly asked Borat director Larry Charles, a friend, to put his name on the movie. Even though many people have not heard of the film--Fox last week reduced the number of screens the movie would be shown on from more than 2,000 to 800 for this weekend's opening--it's being discussed on college campuses everywhere. Which is impressive, since a big part of the marketing campaign has been conducted inadvertently by the government of Kazakhstan. It first threatened legal action against Baron Cohen, then took out a somewhat unsuccessful four-page tourism ad in the New York Times ("The country is home to the world's largest population of wolves"), and finally gave up and invited the comic to visit. Baron Cohen is considering the offer as the ultimate opportunity to conflate his made-up character with reality. "I would absolutely love to go," says Borat director Charles. "Even if we got shot down on the tarmac, it would be a good way to go. That's pretty good bonus material for the DVD."
Charles and his tiny crew were just about that fearless during the making of the film. Baron Cohen was more so. For the two-month shoot, he was in character from early in the morning until night. The crew shot so much footage that Charles is trying to sell the unused parts to HBO as a series. Even when the cops came--which the director says happened at least 50 times--Baron Cohen never dropped character. It's an impressive, perhaps insane, performance: Johnny Knoxville with a sense of humor, Andy Kaufman with a desire to please, Peter Sellers set loose on the public instead of David Niven. "It's like Marlon Brando's performance in On the Waterfront," says Charles. "Before that, everything was stylized, the John Barrymore school. After that, you couldn't act in the old style anymore. I believe that Sacha's performance does the same thing."
At a time when the major TV networks can't figure out what makes people laugh, Baron Cohen, 35, is the leader of a brand of aggressive, cheaply shot street comedy that stretches from the lowbrow Jackass to the more intellectual Stephen Colbert. It's the honesty of real reactions, mixed with the personal risk, that makes kids giggle in discomfort. Picking Kazakhstan, a real country, is part of that Andy Kaufmanesque confrontation, as is Baron Cohen's insistence on doing interviews as Borat. "There's something funny about it being a genuine place," says fellow British comedian David Baddiel, who went to the same private high school and Cambridge a few years before Baron Cohen. "That's what makes Sacha's comedy modern, because if that had been an older comedian, Borat would have been from Stupidlandia or something."