"We salute your war of terror!"

Phew, busy week. Just a quick ditty today: saw Borat recently. Let me put it this way: I think it's quite possible I squirted kidney bile through my left eye from the intense abdominal pressure caused by laughing too hard, for far too long.

Borat is shameless and belligerent, like a meth hooker throwing her rotted teeth at you in the street; it's angry and cruel like a Christian wielding a chainsaw at an abortion clinic, and god damn is it funny.

Sure, it's hardly an artistic masterpiece (I'd bet about half is likely staged) and you'll probably cringe like a baby and cover your face for a good half of it, but I think Borat may just be the finest execution of gallows humour ever put on film. Forget jokes about dicks in apple strudels a la American Pie - Borat shows you that dick, refuses to wash it for months, and then uses it to write its name across your face with apple crust while you sleep. This is the big leagues, kiddies.

The best scene in the movie is a play in three acts (you'll know it when you see it) that ramps up the insanity in perfect doses and finally ends with gleeful devastation in the festering cultural mecca of our time: the hotel-convention-hall business luncheon. My head is exploding just thinking about it.

Some critics are trying to label Cohen's movie as a grandiose experiment in intellectual irony, as if Cohen were some hipster university professor teaching a class about social norms and how they pertain to fart jokes. Having seen the film, it seems they're missing the point. Sure, there is plenty of fodder for the Mensa-lites to jerk off to here, but Borat is first and foremost a movie about human stupidity in every form, and expounded in every way, by a single, stupid man. The fact that Borat's missteps manage to reveal as much about our own idiocy as they do his is just a side-benefit. In fact, I'd bet the people who laughed the hardest at the screening I saw weren't laughing with Borat, they were absolutely laughing at him - and that's just the way Borat would have liked it.