Media Spotlight: Bronwen Low Discusses the Problem with Borat
In December of 2007, Dr. Bronwen Low co-authored "Borat and the Problem of Parody" in reaction to the Sasha Baron Cohen film that took the world by surprise. With a new cringe-worthy Borat film having been released this fall, McGill DISE's Dr. Low was recently interviewed by the Huffington Post (UK edition) as a follow-up to her earlier written critique.
"The trouble is that the fictitious character can, and does, feel unkind. It is often not clear who we are laughing at and why,” she reflects. “Importantly, key to satire is ‘punching upwards,’ which Borat does, for instance, in exposing jingoistic, racist, or sexist Americans, but which falls apart in the character of Borat himself, the ‘backwards’ Kazakh. I suspect that choice and portrayal will seem even more random and mean-spirited in 2020.”
Bronwen refers back to the earlier point about comedy being at its strongest when it derives from lived experiences. “I would be much more interested in seeing the film if the targets of satire weren’t Southern US conservatives, people attending rodeos, Pentacostal Christians at a camp meeting, frat boys—but instead were members of the urban, elite university-educated, cultural class to which SBC belongs,” she argues.
“I don’t like prescriptivism in art, but it does seem that many of the most interesting and compelling voices in comedy are telling their own stories, and probably always have.”