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CineSource Collective Narrative
The Power of Black Comedy Sasha Baron Cohen is back at the top of the box office — well, fourth place — beating out hometown hero “Up” by more then half last weekend's revenue. “Brüno,” Baron Cohen’s new comedy, is a bit more distasteful then "Borat," since he’s not gay, his touch is insufficiently surgical and anti-queerness is one of the last accepted prejudices.
But Cohen’s genius is hard to deny. He’s a damn good actor, his radical new filmmaking form, the narrative-documentary, can deliver brilliant versimilitude, and he tackles the forbidden Jewish question.
Many people don’t quite get it, seeing “Borat” as crass, in poor taste, over-the-top, even stimulating anti-Semitism. Such is the power of irony. It enters the brain as A but leaves as B, obliging the viewer to make the synaptical leap.
Among Iran's many movie lovers, who form the base of the freedom fighters we saw in the streets of Tehran last week, it is easy to imagine some of them viewing a pirated copy of “Borat” and arguing, “Borat is pro anti-Semite!” “No, he is making fun of anti-Semites.”
Certainly, having a bar full of Alabamans singing along to Baron Cohen playing “Throw the Jew Down the Well,” is masterful irony, as Terry Gross noted. That famous "Fresh Air" arbiter of left-leaning taste called the scene, “One of the funniest comedy pieces I have ever seen.”
Basically, “Borat” is the first full-on black humor, Jewish Question film. Of course, the very term “black humor” is another oddly racist-tinged descriptor, but it still works if we look at the fact that black in this context is a positive.
Indeed, going into the dark, difficult side of a story for humor is one of the best ways to analyze and heal it — the tendentious joke, as Freud termed it. It is a way of dealing with pain and contradiction that makes black humor a central part of black comedy, from Richard Pryor to Chris Rock.
And now the Jews have their own epic black humor advocate, Baron Cohen. Similar tendentious humor is explored in “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan,” by Adam Sandler, which openly ironizes the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and a script that A Media, CineSource’s parent company, is developing, called “What Is It With Israel?”
“What Is It With Israel?” concerns two brothers, one smart, one stupid, named Israel and Moses respectively. Although from a religious New York Jewish family, they are your typical friendly, stoner, gamer twenty-somethings living in San Francisco. The only caveat is that Moses, the dumb one, is trying to get a job at a bank, “Because the Jews control them,” and Israel, his more go-getter, architect brother, although a nice guy, is constantly getting into arguments about Israel.
Izzy thinks that in California — a state seized from the Indians, whom they exterminated, and the Spanish, whom they drove out, solely for the purpose of gathering gold — no one has the right to lecture him about the evils of Israel. Throw in the brother’s cousin, Diana, a comely comedienne a la Sarah Silverman, who refuses to discuss the Middle East, “I do comedy, not trajedy,” and then Ariel al-Hafas, the Palestinian writer and Rhodes Scholar, Israel falls in love with, and you have a mad cap comedy that will make you cringe all the way until your sides split.
Whether or not “What Is It With Israel?” is your cup of tea, intense black humor will be the order of the millennium, as we can see from the writers of Saturday Night Live to Sasha Baron Cohen. Perhaps, all we need in the Middle East to break the Israel-Palestine deadlock is not a new diplomatic initiative but a Dr. Strangelove-level comedy.