Russians have no sense of humour

[Elok]

What? He plainly is, and not just for the vulgarity of his humor, which is common enough and hardly noteworthy. What I find far worse is his plain lack of respect for the people whose lives he disrupts. The man leaves a scrambled ****storm in his wake wherever he goes, but he doesn't care. People sign on for an interview with some foreign journalist they've never heard of, and wind up famous for their involvement with some clowning oaf and his mouth-breathing fanboys.

If people don't want to listen to Howard Stern, or watch South Park, they're free to change the channel. Whereas "Borat," or Ali G, or Bruno, jumps into your life and acts like a jackass until you either humor him by playing along--in which case he has supposedly revealed your hidden racism/sexism/misogyny--or continually act horrified by his stuff, in which case your reaction is just as funny but for plain shock value. Or you can act outraged that this twit is disrupting your work for the sake of gutter humor, assuming you caught on, in which case you're castigated for not loving freedom of speech, or having no sense of humor, or something along those lines. Occasionally somebody reacts with plain contempt in a nonfunny way, in which case both parties have wasted their time, but for the most part he makes a very good living abusing the goodwill of others.

[C0ckney]

didn't someone you know get scammed by borat? that was ****ing hillarious.

[Heresson]

Originally posted by Brachy-Pride
but the country shown in the borat movies is not like real kazakhstan more of a mishmash of slavic , central asian, caucasian cultures, far far more similar to say romania, or ukraine than Kazakhstan.

Slavic? Kazakhstan is nearly halfly Russian, with Poles present there as well... Romania is not Slavic. Romania and Ukraine have little to do with central Asia...

[Elok]

Originally posted by C0ckney
didn't someone you know get scammed by borat? that was ****ing hillarious.

Not really. It cost her her job. She then had no money when Katrina hit.

[Barnabas]

Thats sucks, she should go to the news and tell her story

[Bill3000]

Originally posted by Elok


Not really. It cost her her job. She then had no money when Katrina hit.

Mind telling us the story?

[LordShiva]

Was she on the show?

[laurentius]

Originally posted by Elok
Yawn. Baron-Cohen's a childish smeg.

Amen brother.

[TheStinger]

Whether he is a childish smeg or not is not the point. Should he be banned.

Personally no he shouldn't

[Elok]

No, thankfully their part wasn't "funny" enough to make the cut. They reacted like I imagine most people react: they agreed to interview a sane foreign journalist and wound up with this loon bouncing around the studio disrupting their newscast. They didn't humor him for long, and tried to end his bit ASAP. My friend (actually my GF's sister) basically had to drag him off the set. He looked like going back for an encore, and she pleaded with him that it would probably mean her job if he did. So of course he went back anyway, giving the meteorologist a hug or some crap like that.

She was not fired immediately after the incident, only put on thin ice (plus they couldn't do any live interviews after that). Since she was thoroughly rattled by the experience, her performance suffered, and she got fired a few weeks later anyway. Which is why technically she can't sue (she wasn't fired as a direct result of the prank). She went to the news recently, but all that happened was that various local radio hosts called her a gold-digging opportunist.

I realize that most people are going to say, "if she gets unsettled that easily, she would have been fired anyway." And I suppose there might be some truth to that, except she was in line for a promotion before this went off. And even if she were doomed to be fired eventually somehow...I just can't see how my GF's sister deserved to lose her job because of a total stranger's bad comedy routine, and to get no compensation or notice for it.

She was and is a good person; she let him interview station talent for the documentary he claimed to be making (because she'd foolishly failed to guess that this foreign journalist was actually a comedian she'd never heard of who was out to sabotage a TV news broadcast in Jackson, Mississippi), and he returned the favor by being a douche. For the record, nobody involved was interested in singing songs about Jews going down wells.

Anyway, Katrina did a number on her stuff; she's now driving around in a car whose roof is all but eaten through with rust from water damage, and which she can't afford to repair. She has a new job in FL, in her hometown; she had been working in MS, but after the studio fired her she couldn't pay her mortgage (though various family members saved her from foreclosure by chipping in from their savings). So now this grown woman is living with her mother. She's doing better now, but all the same, I consider Sacha Baron-Cohen a total phlegmwad.

[TheStinger]

So she wasn't fired because of Borat then

[Barnabas]

tell her to write an editorial "borat ruined my life" and send it to newspapers, she may get famous and go to tv shows to talk about it.

Or she can try to assasinate him, then write a book

[Elok]

Originally posted by TheStinger
Whether he is a childish smeg or not is not the point. Should he be banned.

Personally no he shouldn't

Do you honestly expect anyone to say, "yes, he should be banned?" No; we let the KKK inflict their nonsense on the world in the name of freedom of speech, so we might as well allow this clown (who's merely insulting and rude rather than directly hateful), provided he stays within the limits of the law. But I have no sympathy for him. He's basically making a mint off of a variant on Charlie Chan's old routines, only with a different ethnic group and accompanied by some high-minded BS about revealing the bigotry of others with his elaborate dirty-foreigner act. Don't get me wrong; it's a very clever form of sophistry that lets people indulge in racist stereotypes while claiming to mock racism, but that doesn't make it any less distasteful to me.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by TheStinger
Whether he is a childish smeg or not is not the point.

Then you shouldn't have titled the thread as you did if you didn't want people to discuss if he was funny or not.

[TheStinger]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Then you shouldn't have titled the thread as you did if you didn't want people to discuss if he was funny or not.

No thats fine, what I think is stupid is if you think its not funny it should be banned.