Long before Sacha Baron Cohen arrived at the MTV Europe Music Awards earlier this month in a fake Air Kazakh plane piloted by a one-eyed man holding a vodka bottle, his Borat character had been raising the hackles of Kazakhstan's foreign ministers. With a song about throwing Jews down wells and extended riffs about the pleasures of rape, urine, and "animal liquid explosions," Borat, the clueless television presenter, entertains HBO audiences at the expense of the central Asian republic. On Monday, though, Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev shot back, suggesting that Cohen could be working with rival politicians and stating that, "We reserve the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of the kind."

Last year, Roman Vassilenko, the press secretary for the Kazakh Embassy in the US, explained to Daniel Radosh in the New Yorker that almost all of the "Kazakh" customs that Borat describes are false. Then Vassilenko went on to explain that one of the most popular sports is actually Catch a Bride, which involves a custom in which "a group of young guys race to get a bride, and she races away from them and they have to catch her while she fends them off with a whip." Gelf talked to Radosh about his article, Borat, and the current threat of legal action. Here are edited excerpts from the email interview.

Courtesy disbealig.com "In my country there is problem."

Gelf Magazine: Did you hear back from the Kazakh embassy after your piece ran? What was the reaction?

Daniel Radosh: I rarely hear from people I write about unless they're angry, so it was nice to get this e-mail from Vassilenko after the Talk piece ran: "Thank you so much for the story, The Borat Doctrine. I am sure many people in Kazakhstan will be grateful to you." Admittedly, I'm probably lucky that English isn't his first language.

GM: When you interviewed him, did it seem to you like Vassilenko was leaning toward suing or threatening legal action against Sacha Baron Cohen?

DR: On the contrary. Here's a quote that didn't make the piece: "I made our position known in the newspapers [i.e., as opposed to in court]. We are too much into freedom of speech even in Kazakhstan, so we believe these are decisions they should think through and make themselves, but we will not do anything legally or otherwise."

GM: Do you think Borat is funny? What about compared to Ali G and Bruno?

DR: Of course. Who doesn't love Borat? I like all the characters but definitely by the end of the last season, Borat had become my favorite, partly because he has the most depth as a character. I think the movie will be great. They fired that director who made the awful Road Trip movie and got the guy from Curb Your Enthusiasm, right? [Eds: That's right.] That's a much better fit. Unless I have it backwards, in which case the movie might suck. Speaking of which, I recently saw the Ali G movie. Holy crap, what a turd.

GM: What do you make of the latest news? Is it silly for the press to quote someone claiming they'll take legal action, when it's not at all clear what kind of legal action they might be able to take?

DR: Silly? The press? Never. Besides if you read the original Reuters story that every one uses as their source, it's not even clear that anyone is threatening a suit, as the lede claims. The only quote is "We reserve the right to any legal action…
" That's very different from "planning legal action." But hey, it was a funny story when I wrote it, and it's a funny story again. I understand why people want to keep repeating it.

GM: Anything else we should know about this controversy?

DR: What controversy?

Related on the Web

•Daniel Radosh's website.

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