We’re awfully sad today at DCist headquarters, after learning this morning that we missed out on spotting Borat (the faux-Kazakh reporter portrayed by comedian Sasha Baron Cohen) trying to gain entry to the White House yesterday, though sadly, to no avail. His visit to D.C. was a brilliant piece of publicity timing, coinciding both with the first official state visit of Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev, as well as the upcoming release of his new film, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
Luckily, intrepid boy blogger The Nabob was there to bring us this glorious photo of Borat’s earlier stunt, hosting a brief and bold press conference in front of the Embassy of Kazakhstan. Check out his entire account, not to mention The Post’s not-to-be-missed video. The Reliable Source gals sum up Borat’s statements thusly:
He began by waving an actual four-page advertisement that the former Soviet republic placed in yesterday’s New York Times touting its sophisticated culture, religious tolerance and gender equality.
“These are disgusting fabrications!” he said in a thick, ambiguously foreign accent. They’re perpetrated by “evil nitwits” from neighboring Uzbekistan “who, as we all know, are a very nosy people with a bone in the middle of their brain.”
Sadly, the Kazakh government has long demonstrated their lack of a sense of humor in all things Borat-related, thus explaining the expensive PR campaign they’ve launched, mentioned above. To us, the genius of Borat isn’t that he’s poking fun at Kazakhstan — it’s that he’s skewering many Americans’ complete lack of knowledge of the outside world by showing how much we’ll put up with from someone who is foreign. The classic example is his performance of the song “In My Country There is Problem” in an Arizona country and western bar on Da Ali G Show, when he was able to get unsuspecting patrons to sing along to lyrics like “Throw the Jews Down the Well” (Cohen himself is Jewish).
To be sure, we’ll be on the lookout for any more Borat sightings in our fair city. Perhaps a DCist-hosted debate about all the ways in which you can compare a woman to a horse is order. Borat, can you hear us?
