Global tensions have never been so funny

Sacha Baron Cohen, who at this point probably doesn’t want you to know he actually exists, despite having been in the movies “Madagascar� and “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,� is oh-so thisclose to creating an international incident – all to promote his upcoming movie, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.�

Borat, hands-down the funniest character of Cohen’s Emmy-nominated series “Da Ali G Show,� appeared in Washington, D.C. yesterday, mocking the Kazakhstani government’s wildly thin-skinned response to his movie. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev will meet President Bush today; it was widely (if erroneously) reported that he intended to complain to the President about the impending release of the film. As is, Kazakhstan took out a four-page ad in the New York Times on Thursday arguing that the country was just a smidgen more progressive than Borat’s antics made it seem.

Which is all well and good, but here’s guessing most people are asking: What’s up with this Borat? Who really knows or gets what he’s about? (For the film, Cohen is only allowing interviews with his screen mask. And you know how your Mayor disapproves of those who hide behind a comic persona.)

Sure, his film was a rave at the recent Toronto Film Festival, with everyone who saw it declaring it the most hilarious/offensive/hilariously offensive/offensively hilarious movie they’d seen in years.

Not that many people actually saw “Da Ali G Show� in America, but here is the indisputably funniest thing the show ever offered, and quite likely one of the funniest things you’ve seen on television.

In the clip, Borat attends a wine tasting in the deep South. There are many laughs, but three things are remarkable in this clip:

1) The inspired bit of physical business in which two men try to get Borat to hold a wine glass in the proper manner – by its stem. Of the three involved in this, two have no idea that they’re participating in a gag, and yet it works perfectly: Once they get Borat to carry his wine glass appropriately, he puts it on the table and engages the conflict anew.

2) Borat notes that the society’s wine steward is black and asks if he is one of the men’s slaves. They explain that slavery has been abolished in America, and when Borat approves of the region’s ostensible progressiveness, one agrees that the abolition of slavery was “a good thing – “for them.�

3) Borat gets wasted – he downs glass after glass, ahead of his guests, declaring, “I win!� Eventually, he gets so blitzed that he wallows in self-pity, informing them, “My mother, she never loved me. She tell me she wish sometimes she been raped by someone else.� This is such a darkly funny line that even Joe Scarborough, MSNBC’s most engaging conservative pundit, quoted it admiringly on Thursday.

Hence, if the “Borat� movie is remotely as funny as this sequence, and the advance reviews are correct, it’s left to us to guess whether Peter Travers or Joel Siegel will issue this blurb: "You'll laugh until some jihadist murders you!"