George Pitcher

Happily, we're laughing at the awful Borat Sagdiyev, not with him.

Sacha Baron Cohen has followed his rude-boi Ali G spoof with a new character, Borat Sagdiyev, a foul-mouthed TV reporter from Kazakhstan, who tours America "promoting" his home country with a stream of sexist, homophobic and anti-semitic views. The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is outraged and has commissioned a $40m movie celebrating Kazakhstan's noble history to counter Cohen's pastiche and has complained to President George Bush about Cohen's portrayal in a recent visit to the States.

I think President Nazarbayev spectacularly misses the point and is in danger of confirming Borat's case for Kazakhstani bone-headedness. If you watch Cohen's film of his tour of the US as Borat, note the expressions of bemusement on the faces of Americans he encounters, watch how they accept at face-value some of his outrageous attitudes, see how by their inaction they implicitly endorse some of his views. Now consider that Borat arrived at a film premiere in Toronto in a cart drawn by peasant-women in traditional Kazakstan costume, that he claims the national drink of Kazakhstan is fermented horse urine and that his main hobbies are mud-wrestling and goat-punching.

Just as the target of the satire in the show at the Edinburgh Festival entitled Jesus: The Guantanamo Years was not the Christian faith but the horrors of Guantanamo Bay, Cohen's satirical target is not Kazakhstan - though some of his gibes at it are undoubtedly very funny - but those who might believe him. We're not laughing at Kazakhstan. We're laughing at the Americans who believe that central Asia might really be like that.

Rather than po-facedly commission a heroic film, Kazakhstan's President might smile wryly when he meets President Bush and say "Mr President, you'd have to be really dumb to believe that Kazakhstan is like that". Or he could commission his own cod documentary, depicting a Fox News reporter touring Kazakhstan, telling its natives that the United States is commanded by a warmonger who dodged the draft himself, who electrocuted or lethally injected poor blacks to get elected and who has declared world war on an abstract noun. Only that wouldn't be funny, because it's largely true.

Then there are those who complain about the anti-semitism of Cohen's character Borat. Yes, there is truth in the observation that Cohen can get away with it because he's Jewish himself and I have some sympathy with the view of a Jewish stand-up comic I met recently who said that Jews cannot truly be free of the burden of the Holocaust until non-Jews can do gags about it too. But I believe the more fundamental point is that ridicule is one of the most potent political weapons known to humankind (ask any senior politician). Cohen has us laughing at him in his pantomime anti-semitism. Not, thankfully, with him.