Walking out of “Borat” last year I was offended. My friends with me were offended. We discussed why the movie was racist, anti-semitic and misogynistic. None of us thought that the movie was particularly funny.
Why then did “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” win critical acclaim from the media? ABC Reviewer Joel Siegel called “Borat” “one of the funniest movies [he has] ever seen.” David Ansen of Newsweek called the film a “watershed comic event.”
In fact, nearly everyone I spoke to who was at least one generation senior to mine found the film hilarious.
What differentiated my Whitman social circle from the majority of film viewers? Perhaps everyone else is a racist for finding the film funny and we in our ivory tower at Whitman are in the right.
More likely is the possibility that we at Whitman have an immature and have a hypersensitized view of diversity.
While the symposia did great good to correct the ignorance that revealed itself so clearly in the listserv debate following the blackface incident, the days devoted to diversity have done very little to increase students’ comfort level surrounding issues of race. If anything, the symposia simply created an environment of hypersensitivity where students are afraid to say anything on the topic of race for fear of being politically incorrect and offensive.
Without a level of comfort on the issue of racism we still squirm and avoid more complex discussions than the mainstream, politically correct approach of trying to celebrate other cultures. We refuse to break the two-dimensional construct of black and white. And within that construct we refuse to see that it is grayscale in all of its dimensions. Most of all, when the topic of race is couched in a context other than a formal lecture or celebration, we reject the message on face. Without a more developed comfort level it is impossible to have a productive conversation on the issues surrounding race.
Some may believe that regardless of any comfort level, there are certain issues that must not be laughed at. I vehemently disagree. As Joan Rivers explained to Newsweek after “Borat” was released, “Comedy is there to break open the box that holds the untouchable and the unsayable. It’s about making you face the things you don’t want to face, and the easiest way to face it is through humor.”
The brilliance of satire is that it reveals the stupidity of ideas by reducing those principles to the absurd. Satire is uncomfortable precisely because it is so absurd. It succeeds by allowing us to release this discomfort through laughter and ultimately come to a deeper understanding of the issue.
Our discomfort when experiencing satire ebbs and flows while we dynamically remember and forget the context of what we are watching or reading.
Each time we lose the context all we see is hate-speech. It is that hate that is at the center of the attack by the satirist. If only for a moment we experience that hate and are cut by it. The context returns and we can release our emotions through nervous laughter. Through this process we become aware of how wrong the protagonist of the satirist’s story is.
This realization is the ultimate form of mocking. The satirist has caught us in our own comfortable lie and we are now forced to abandon that refuge in favor of an alternative viewpoint.
In short, satire is the mirror that shows us our flaws. It should make us uncomfortable. However, as Salman Rushdie reminded us, we need to develop the skin that will allow us to peer into that mirror. Any number of symposia will not grow this skin for us. We can only gain the mental toughness needed to have the imperative and difficult conversations through a slow and painful maturation process.
An elementary school teacher told my class, “There is nothing funny that doesn’t hurt someone else, so don’t joke around in my class.” I have come to realize that he was wrong. Satire is funny because it rights the wrongs of culture. I watched “Borat” again last night and I laughed.
