Borat: No 1 best comedy film of all time

Could anyone have foreseen just how great a comedy Borat – or to give it its full title, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan – was going to be? Its star, Sacha Baron Cohen, had honed the satirical stunt documentary to perfection in his Ali G TV series, but had crashed and burned when trying to put the character on the big screen, in the awful Ali G Indahouse. It's still a bit of a mystery why Baron Cohen ever got the chance to make a follow-up, but he wisely went back to the format that had proved itself time and again on TV: set up an apparently clueless fictional character, and send him in to encounter real-life types and get them to make idiots of themselves. Borat, the cheerfully antisemitic TV presenter from Kazakhstan, who had populated Baron Cohen's TV spots since the late 90s, may not have appeared promising material for a feature, but boy was everyone wrong.

The film is based on a simple idea: Borat is making a documentary about the US. But the opening section, in which he introduces his home village and its inhabitants, establishes a tone of breathtaking offensiveness. The "Kazakh" actors clearly have no idea about the outrageous things Borat is saying about them, and Baron Cohen crowns proceedings by staging a "running of the Jew", supposedly a regular local pastime. Thus the stage is set: the film is an incredibly cruel satire, aimed at both post-Soviet bigotry and American social dysfunction.

By the time he gets to the US, Baron Cohen is in full flow, the superficial ingenuousness of his creation opening all sorts of doors. Arguably the most spectacular, and certainly unplanned, result is the consternation he causes by bravely singing a spoof national anthem at a rodeo in Texas; the electric hostility he triggers in the spectators unnerves one of the horses so much it falls over.

Baron Cohen, as has been pointed out, can be faulted perhaps for bamboozling the uncomprehending and the weak. But that misses the point of much of what makes Borat great: the joke is almost always on him as well. The sort of comedy that Baron Cohen is trying for is high-risk for sure, and hardly guaranteed to provide results – but Borat is all gold. We may never see its like again.