This is an interview of Sacha Baron Cohen by Terry Gross from 2007 regarding the movie Borat. It was re-aired today.
I didn't especially like Borat. Some specific scenes were really smart and hilarious, but I was put off by Cohen's representation of Kazakhstan. It seemed a random choice of country and offensive without any purpose. While I have nothing against satire being offensive, in fact I think it's necessary, I believe that it has to be smart to be good. I didn't see anything smart about Cohen's use of Kazakhstan. Borat would have been just as hilarious, and made the same point, if Borat had come from a fictional backwater country.
But Cohen did say something in the interview that struck me. Terry Gross was asking him, since Cohen is Jewish, if there was a difference between playing Borat, an anti-semite, and making fun of gay stereotypes as Bruno.
The main difference between doing Bruno and Borat, and Bruno, for those that don't know, is this Austrian gay fashion reporter, is that it is a lot more dangerous doing Bruno because there is so much homophobia. So, for example, when I was doing Bruno at the Alabama Mississippi football game in Alabama a few years ago, 60,000 people started chanting, the crowd started chanting faggot and started throwing stuff at me and taunting me and spitting at me and threatening to kill me. And those kind of situations are a lot more common when you're playing a gay character. It is almost as if homophobia is the last form of prejudice that is really tolerated.
