Ronald Reagan once shared a letter he received from a man who wrote: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
That’s the promise. That’s what makes this country different. The idea that it doesn’t matter where you were born or what you look like or what language you speak. You show up, you learn, you work hard, and you belong. America is supposed to be that place. The place that accepts everyone.
In 2006, a film called Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan tested that promise. Even the title tells you something. It’s long, grammatically broken, and sounds like it was written by someone who barely speaks English but is trying his hardest. That’s not laziness. That’s the character in a single sentence. And the results of that test are complicated.
The Innocent Man
Here’s the thing people get wrong about Borat. They think the joke is him. The loud, inappropriate, offensive foreigner who doesn’t understand anything. But Borat isn’t the joke. Borat is the mirror.
Borat Sagdiyev shows up in America as a man from somewhere else. He’s curious. He’s eager. He wants to learn. Yes, he’s ignorant. Yes, he says and does things that are shocking. But underneath all of that, there’s something genuine. He’s a man who believes in the promise. He came to America because he was told it was the greatest country in the world and he believed it. He wants to understand the culture, meet the people, participate in the society. He’s doing exactly what Reagan described. He’s showing up from a corner of the world and trying to become American.
And what does he find?
He finds people who are patient with him. A driving instructor who calmly teaches him despite his chaos. Etiquette coaches who genuinely try to help him understand how to behave at a dinner party. A humor coach who works with him in good faith. These people see a confused foreigner and their instinct is to help. That’s the best of America. That’s the promise working.
But he also finds something else. A gun shop owner who doesn’t flinch when asked for a weapon to kill Jews. Frat boys in an RV who say things about women that make your skin crawl the moment they feel comfortable enough. A rodeo crowd that cheers for anti-Muslim sentiments before realizing who they’re cheering for. Dinner party guests whose politeness vanishes the moment a Black woman walks in.
Borat didn’t put those thoughts in anyone’s head. He’s innocent. He just showed up. He just asked questions. He just existed as a foreigner in their space. And the people around him, some of them, revealed something they’d normally keep hidden.
That’s the art of this film. The character is innocent. The revelations are not.
The Mirror
What makes Borat art and not just a prank show is the duality. It captures the best and worst of America in the same film, sometimes in the same scene.
The dinner party sequence is the perfect example. The guests are polite. They teach Borat how to use a toilet. They tolerate things that would make most people throw someone out immediately. When Borat brings a bag of his own feces to the table, they handle it with patience. These are good people trying to be kind to someone who clearly doesn’t understand their world. That’s beautiful, genuinely.
And then a Black woman shows up and the energy shifts. Not overtly. Not in a way that anyone on camera would admit to. But it shifts. The contrast between their patience with Borat’s absurdity and their discomfort with someone who looks different is the quiet knife that the film slides in without twisting.
Sacha Baron Cohen understood something profound. You don’t expose people by confronting them. You expose them by making them comfortable. Borat’s ignorance is a gift to the people he meets because it makes them feel superior, safe, and off guard. And in that comfort, they say what they actually think.
The guy at the rodeo who tells Borat he should shave his mustache so he doesn’t look Muslim? He said that to a stranger with a camera rolling. He said it because he felt safe saying it. That safety is what Borat provides. Not a trap. Just space. Space for people to be who they already are.
The Art of Commitment
What Sacha Baron Cohen did to make this film is borderline insane.
He stayed in character as Borat from the moment he left his hotel every morning until after production wrapped at night. Not just during scenes. All day. When the Secret Service questioned him, he stayed in character. When the FBI opened a file because they received so many complaints about a suspicious man driving an ice cream truck across America, the character held.
The police were called on him 92 times during filming. The rodeo scene in Virginia got so hostile that the original director quit because he feared for the crew’s safety. A lawyer was kept on set for the entire shoot.
The “Kazakh” language Borat speaks? It’s mostly Hebrew with a heavy fake Eastern European accent. Cohen is Jewish. The character is violently anti-Semitic. A Jewish man created the most anti-Semitic character in modern film to expose real anti-Semitism. That’s not just commitment. That’s art using itself as the weapon.
Only four people in the entire film knew the truth. Everyone else, every person you see reacting on screen, thought they were interacting with a real foreign journalist. The fake production company “One America Productions” was set up to make the deception work. Participants signed release forms. The village scenes were filmed in Romania. The Romanian villagers were told it was a documentary about poverty. The Kazakh government took out a four-page insert in the New York Times defending their country.
Cohen himself is Cambridge-educated. His thesis was about the involvement of Jews in the American civil rights movement. Seth Rogen and Patton Oswalt worked on the script uncredited. Cohen’s brother composed the music. For his audition for Sweeney Todd with Tim Burton, Cohen sang the entire score of Fiddler on the Roof. The man behind the most ignorant character in film history is one of the most educated performers alive.
That contradiction is the engine. Cohen uses his intelligence to play ignorance so convincingly that it becomes a tool for revealing other people’s real ignorance. That’s layers within layers. That’s art.
Why People Hate It
The criticism comes from two sides.
Some people see the surface. They see a character who is racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic. They see the offensive things he says and does and they stop there. They don’t process that the offense is the mechanism, not the message. The character’s bigotry is a tool designed to draw out real bigotry from real people. But if you’re not looking at the structure, you just see a man being horrible on screen.
The other side is the consent argument. The people in the film didn’t know what they were part of. They thought they were helping a foreigner. They were actually being filmed for a comedy that would be seen globally. Multiple lawsuits followed. Frat boys claimed they were drunk when they signed the releases. The Romanian villagers sued. Cohen hasn’t lost a single case, but the question remains: is it fair?
I think it is. Because nobody was tricked into being someone they’re not. They were tricked into being comfortable enough to be exactly who they are. The gun shop owner wasn’t given a script about killing Jews. That was his own response. The frat boys weren’t told what to say about women. That was their own conversation. Borat didn’t create anything. He just created the conditions for honesty. And honesty, it turns out, is uncomfortable.
Why People Love It
Beyond the satire, Borat is just absurdly funny. The chicken on the subway was real. The reactions were real. The naked wrestling scene goes on for so long that it stops being funny, becomes uncomfortable, then wraps back around to being the funniest thing you’ve ever seen because it refuses to end.
But the deeper reason people love it is the same reason it works as art. It captures something true about human behavior that no scripted film could. The patience of the etiquette coaches. The warmth of the driving instructor. The humor coach genuinely trying to help. These moments of kindness are just as real as the moments of bigotry. America, in this film, is both things at once. Generous and prejudiced. Open and guarded. Welcoming and hostile. The film holds both truths at the same time without choosing one.
And Borat himself, the character, is somehow the most human element. He’s chasing Pamela Anderson across the country, which is absurd. But underneath that absurdity is loneliness. A man far from home, looking for connection in a place he doesn’t understand. That’s not just a comedy setup. That’s the immigrant experience compressed into a joke that hits harder than it should.
Why There Will Never Be Another One
The internet killed the possibility.
In 2006, you could travel across America in character and nobody could check. There was no Twitter thread identifying you in real time. No TikTok video exposing the setup. No one was Googling “Kazakh journalist” during the interview. The world that allowed Borat to exist was a world where trust between strangers was still the default.
That world is gone. Everyone performs for cameras now. Everyone is aware they might be recorded. The raw, unguarded reactions that make Borat work don’t happen the same way anymore because people are always a little bit on guard. Borat caught America in an unguarded moment. That moment is over.
Cohen himself retired from undercover character work after the sequel. He wore a bulletproof vest to a gun rally because his team was told someone might shoot him. He escaped a hostile crowd in a private ambulance. He said “at some point, your luck runs out.”
The Promise and the Reflection
Reagan’s quote is about the promise. America is the place where anyone from anywhere can belong. That’s the ideal. And it’s a beautiful one. It’s one of the reasons people like me, born on the other side of the world, end up here. Because the promise is real enough to believe in.
Now let’s take a moment and think about something. What if Borat was real?
Not Sacha Baron Cohen in a gray suit. Not a Cambridge-educated comedian running an elaborate operation. Just Borat. A real Kazakh journalist who showed up in America with a camera crew, barely spoke the language, understood nothing about the culture, and started meeting people.
What would have happened to him?
People taught him. The driving instructor taught him how to drive. The etiquette coaches taught him how to behave at dinner. The humor coach taught him how to be funny. A gun shop owner helped him pick a weapon. People invited him into their homes. They sat with him. They answered his questions. They were patient when he made mistakes. Some of them revealed ugly things about themselves, sure. But most of them just tried to help a stranger figure out their country.
And if Borat was real, where would he be now? Think about it. A man from nowhere, from a village with no real infrastructure, shows up in America with nothing but curiosity and a camera. Nobody knew it was a film being shot. Only a few people were in on it. Everyone else treated him like a real person. They gave him their time, their advice, their patience.
Did he learn from America? Yes. Did he step up his game? Yes. Did he make something of himself? A man who arrived knowing nothing became one of the most recognizable people on the planet. His catchphrases entered the language. His face was everywhere. He became a star.
If Borat was a real man, America delivered on the promise. It took the most extreme version of “someone from somewhere else,” someone who broke every rule, offended every norm, understood nothing about how things work here, and it still gave him a shot. People still helped him. People still engaged with him. People still opened doors.
America is imperfect. The film proved that beyond any doubt. But the promise still holds. Because even in a film designed to expose the worst, the best showed up too. The kindness was real. The patience was real. The willingness to help a stranger was real.
I moved to this country from the other side of the planet. I know what it feels like to be the guy who doesn’t understand the customs, who doesn’t know the rules, who’s figuring it out in real time. And I can tell you the promise is real. Not perfect. Not for everyone equally. Not without its cracks. But real.
If it worked for Borat, the most absurd, offensive, clueless man to ever set foot in this country, it can work for anyone.
That’s the promise. And it’s still worth believing in.