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IN YOUR FACE.

Article Excerpt
Who is Sacha Baron Cohen? We know that he is British, that he is Jewish, and that he studied history at Cambridge, where his cousin Simon is a professor of developmental psycho-pathology. Sacha has entered a no less delicate field. He is a squirmist: a master of SECS, or Socio-Ethnophobic Comic Simulations, in which he adopts fictional personae and then marches briskly into the real world with a mission to embarrass its inhabitants. His first coup was the invention of Ali G, a would-be rapper from the London suburbs, who inveigled celebrities--first in England, then in America--to trip themselves up on camera. He realized that, under the rules of international tolerance, they could not be seen to ignore the earnest entreaties of a young man in a gold tracksuit and wraparound shades. The definition of a clever stunt is one that tempts no less a personage than Noam Chomsky (or, as Ali G calls him, "my main man Professor Norman Chomsky") to join the ranks of stooges--remaining thoughtful as the sexually bullish Ali inquires of him, "How would you like it if I called you bilingual?"

Next up, and more addictive still, was Borat Sagdiyev, the bony and wire-haired journalist from Kazakhstan. Unlike Ali G, who found only a televised niche, Borat is, as he would boast, becoming huge. Uncontainable on TV, he has swelled into cinemas, his wooing of America aided by the simple trick of filming him in America--on a coast-to-coast pilgrimage, with Pamela Anderson as his Holy Grail. The resulting film is titled "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," and it purports to be a documentary showing Borat lurching gaily from one instructive fiasco to the next. These include a driving lesson, a meeting of veteran feminists ("I could not concentrate on what...

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