by MARK SLUTSKY

By now, if you fit the demographic of this paper, you’ve surely heard of Borat Sagdiyev and his outrageous antics. But a quick refresher course if you haven’t: created by British funnyman Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat is a Kazakh telejournalist sent to America to learn of the Western world’s strange customs and ways.

Blissfully innocent of our cultural mores, Borat first popped up on Cohen’s Da Ali G Show, where he’d interview real people unaware of the fact that they were dealing with a fictional character, and who’d struggle to stay polite in the face of his smiling sexism, anti-Semitism and tendency to do things like loudly discuss his mother’s rape at a wine tasting.

Now, in the window of time before enough people get wind of the joke and make perpetuating the scheme impossible, Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles have put together Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, a “moviefilm,” as our hero would call it, that uses a loose narrative to link together all manner of Boratian escapades.

The basic idea is that Borat and producer Azamat Bagatov (the magnificently ursine and disturbing Ken Davitian) have been sent to the “U.S. and A.” to report back on the country. While visiting, Borat becomes obsessed with Pamela Anderson and sets out on a pilgrimage to California to find and wed her.

That’s all there largely to string together a frequently gut-bustingly hilarious series of episodes involving Borat doing very bad or inappropriate things, and using his sheer offensive guilelessness to bring out the worst in his interview subjects, like the rodeo cowboy who vigorously agrees with his insanely homophobic comments.

Of course, there’s the matter of Borat’s cartoonish anti-Semitism—Cohen is of course Jewish, which both legitimizes and gives a masochistic bent to sequences like “The Running of the Jew” and the scene where Borat throws money at insects, believing them to be Jews in disguise.

How you feel about some of this may depend on your level of squeamishness; frankly, I found the film to be mostly incredibly funny, as outrageous and offensive as the similarly amazing and difficult Jackass films. Rare is the comedy that pushes buttons this brilliantly and successfully. I like.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan opens this Friday, Nov. 3

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