Borat Attack!

I’m in NRO this morning adding my piece to the Borat hype machine. For once, it’s deserved:

Guerilla comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film, Borat, takes the Hiroshima approach to comedy: It’s an uncompromising, total assault on civilization. Nothing is sacred, and the aftermath leaves no one standing. You can be appalled at its vulgarity and debate its virtues, but there can be no doubt of its devastating effects.

To call this movie crass would be like calling Cindy Sheehan “a little kooky.” The word doesn’t even begin to describe it. Cohen has a fundamental dedication to pushing every scene to its most gasp-inducing extreme. But unlike so many other purveyors of gross-out gags, this is not merely a string of stunts. The genius of Borat is how the character exploits our country’s obsession with conflict-avoidance and multicultural tolerance. It’s a shiv to the guts of appeasement, and it just might be the best — and certainly the funniest — deconstruction of American pretensions ever made.

Read the whole thing at National Review Online.