I think the original joke was meant to be about people who saw that and thought Kazakhstan was actually that terrible, without either reflecting on the US or educating themselves even a tiny bit on Kazakhstan .
Like it's a spoof on how Americans view ex-soviet nations or any non-british colonial state, while America itself has no trouble partaking in nearly all of the same depravities that Kazakhstan supposedly does.
Making up a whole country would also work, but they probably thought someone would catch on if he was just saying a non-existent country, though in reality a lot of the people he interviews probably would have zero clue the difference.
I think there's merit to his tactic and I'd like to think he's not deliberately trying to be racist. But fuck I always think back to that scene from his "home" village (filmed in Romania) from that first film and it was just waaaayyy too much.
When I think about it, my main criticism against him is similar to one of the main criticisms against black face: someone is coming in and depicting a voiceless minority in an inaccurate and insulting way for entertainment.
Can blackface be used to effectively critique bad things? I suppose I can envision that. But still, it's inherently pretty dicey in my eyes.
Can blackface be used to effectively critique bad things? I suppose I can envision that. But still, it’s inherently pretty dicey in my eyes.
Interestingly, there were actually a number of minstrel show writers who fancied themselves “progressives” and tried (and usually failed) to use the genre to humanize black people.
There’s a famous minstrel song called “Nellie was a Lady” about a black steamboat captain who returns from a long voyage to find his wife as died. It was controversial in the South because it referred to a black woman as a “lady”. Thing is it was still sung by a white dude with burnt cork on his face. Most of these writers ended up realizing you can’t really use blackface progressively and abandoned the genre.
Well the crude punching down on Lybia and Ghadaffi in The Dictator was blatantly intentional, so I don't think we can assume that Cohen is impervious to and thus not working from an internalised imperialist perspective.
It's one of them....how outrageous does it have to be for people to understand it's irony? It's not even like he skirts the line, he clears the line by miles and (some) Americans are still like "yup this is what everyone is like outside of freedom town".
I mean, it does suck a lot for the people of Kazakhstan to be portrayed in international media as a bunch of incestuous racists.
Whatever problems Kazakhstan as a country or government has, it still feels wrong to me to punch down on ordinary Kazakhs.
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I think the original joke was meant to be about people who saw that and thought Kazakhstan was actually that terrible, without either reflecting on the US or educating themselves even a tiny bit on Kazakhstan .
Like it's a spoof on how Americans view ex-soviet nations or any non-british colonial state, while America itself has no trouble partaking in nearly all of the same depravities that Kazakhstan supposedly does.
Making up a whole country would also work, but they probably thought someone would catch on if he was just saying a non-existent country, though in reality a lot of the people he interviews probably would have zero clue the difference.
I think there's merit to his tactic and I'd like to think he's not deliberately trying to be racist. But fuck I always think back to that scene from his "home" village (filmed in Romania) from that first film and it was just waaaayyy too much.
When I think about it, my main criticism against him is similar to one of the main criticisms against black face: someone is coming in and depicting a voiceless minority in an inaccurate and insulting way for entertainment.
Can blackface be used to effectively critique bad things? I suppose I can envision that. But still, it's inherently pretty dicey in my eyes.
Interestingly, there were actually a number of minstrel show writers who fancied themselves “progressives” and tried (and usually failed) to use the genre to humanize black people.
There’s a famous minstrel song called “Nellie was a Lady” about a black steamboat captain who returns from a long voyage to find his wife as died. It was controversial in the South because it referred to a black woman as a “lady”. Thing is it was still sung by a white dude with burnt cork on his face. Most of these writers ended up realizing you can’t really use blackface progressively and abandoned the genre.
That's actually pretty interesting as an example of the limits of satire
Well the crude punching down on Lybia and Ghadaffi in The Dictator was blatantly intentional, so I don't think we can assume that Cohen is impervious to and thus not working from an internalised imperialist perspective.
It's one of them....how outrageous does it have to be for people to understand it's irony? It's not even like he skirts the line, he clears the line by miles and (some) Americans are still like "yup this is what everyone is like outside of freedom town".
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tbh most of the people depicted don't look like the average Kazakh, who looks quite a bit more Asian.
Kazakhstan has lots of (recent) Russian migration and the people I saw in the movie basically looked either Caucasian or Russian.
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