Borat. Just When You Thought You'd Had Enough Edition.

"We keep telling everyone that Borat is on the new cover of Rolling Stone (on stands everywhere Friday) and that the cover feature includes an interview with Sacha Baron Cohen. And people are like 'yeah, so, he's been everywhere' and we're like no, Sacha himself is talking to us, not as Borat, but about Borat (and other things)."

A sampling from the sampling, Baron Cohen on "Throw the Jew Down the Well":

[I]t revealed something about that bar in Tucson. And the question is: Did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism.

Updated through 11/19.

I remember, when I was in university I studied history, and there was this one major historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw. And his quote was, "The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference." I know it's not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's an interesting idea that not everyone in Germany had to be a raving anti-Semite. They just had to be apathetic.

In Slate, Christopher Hitchens responds to Ryan Gilbey's piece on Borat in the New Statesman: "Oh come on." For Hitchens, it's Americans' "attitude of painfully maintained open-mindedness and multiculturalism that is really being unmasked and satirized by our man from the 'stan."

More:

• Now the Romanians are pissed, too.

• "The Bagger gets the joke, it just doesn't make him laugh."

• At PopMatters, Amos Posner: "Anyone willing to take the movie or themselves seriously enough to take offense is immediately folded into the gag."

Updates, 11/19: Slate's got the filmmakers "Standard Consent Agreement." David Poland thinks it's possible that the "form was a lot more reasonable than any of the accusations suggest."

Jim Emerson replies to Hitchens and David Brooks.

The "Black Carpet" advertising campaign worked, argues RyanCarrigg at Compete.

Posted by dwhudson at November 16, 2006 6:48 AM