Why 'Borat' Leaves Me Cold

LOS ANGELES--I love to laugh and am not particularly highbrow about what makes me do so. Laughing myself silly while watching "American Pie" was a sublime experience for me. Yet the comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen leaves me cold even as his current film, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" promises to have Western audiences in stitches.

Perhaps this is because, when it comes to being the "crazy foreigner," I am the genuine article. Cohen in Borat's role is merely faking it by creating a stereotype.

The film, scheduled to be released nationwide on Nov. 3 by 20th Century Fox, is a cause of political concern as Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose country has taken official offense at the work, visits the United States. Fox, mindful of the controversy, set up One America as a separate entity to produce the film.

In it Cohen plays Borat Sagdiyev, an oafish broadcast journalist from Kazakhstan who is sent here to make a film about America. Once here, whether he is learning English, attending a dinner party, hitting the road or interacting with the young, he consistently manages to embarrass everyone but himself.

His experiences in a way parallels my own when I came to America in the mid-1960s as an Iranian foreign student for cultural learnings to make benefit glorious nation of Iran. At that time, Iran was considered a worthier American ally than Kazakhstan is today.

My ambitions, however, were far greater than making a mere movie. For months prior to coming to America, I compulsively made sketches of the Time-Life Building in Midtown Manhattan -- then a mighty symbol of American journalism -- telling one and all that I intended to establish an even greater American media empire of my own.

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