I remember first seeing Tom Goes To The Mayor on adultswim and it being like a breath of fresh air. It felt like finally someone got how absurd it is to live in small town america.

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[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The first Borat showed me a realm of funny I had not yet established trade routes with, it was awesome

[–] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 22 points 4 months ago (2 children)

kombucha-disgust horrible racist stereotypes of Central Asians

let-em-cook it gave us Nick Mullen

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Okay yeah I should establish that it is a problematic fav

I was much more interested in how it captured a deranged side of post 9/11 America that I was steeped in but saw no representation of.

Like people literally fled from him for approaching them while looking indistinctly foreign

[–] LENINSGHOSTFACEKILLA@hexbear.net 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Same! Borat had a lot of problems with stereotypes, but it was also kind of ahead of its time at making fun of the racism of Americans towards literally everyone.

[–] HumanBehaviorByBjork@hexbear.net 13 points 4 months ago

honestly the funniest thing is sacha baron cohen turning out to not be a lefty or a righty but a stone LIB

[–] booty@hexbear.net 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure the joke is "Americans are so racist that this is how they view foreigners and will accept it without question" like it's essentially the same joke we make about dprk supersoldiers casually pushing trains but with a way higher budget

[–] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I mean more the fact that Sacha is a huge Zionist himself and his portrayal of Central Asians as antisemitic savages in the Kazakhstan scenes is incredibly weird considering how much of a problem antisemitism is in the West, it's this framing of Muslims as uniquely antisemitic that kinda feeds into the support of the genocide rn which is why I really hate to see it.

[–] booty@hexbear.net 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Well yeah that's what I mean, I always thought the movie was pointing a mirror at the American audience and saying "this is what you think foreign countries are like right?" Which tied in to him taking that character from that fictional country that is how Americans imagine other parts of the world to be and traveling as him to America where the average person fully accepted it

That said, in the context that he is a Zionist himself it does seem entirely possible that it wasn't as intentional as that

[–] FunkyStuff@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

I read it that way when I saw it myself (admittedly I saw it pretty recently), but in context I think the most charitable interpretation is that Sacha is comparing American racists to what he imagined Muslims to be.