Borat was never funny to me. I remember in the mid 2000's when I couldn't get away from movies quotes of his, being confused, because I didn't find the movie to be that funny.
I have to mansplane the concept then..
Borat hits hard, because people get drawn in laughing at him, because thats the entire appeal at first glance - an exceptionally dumb foreigner you laugh about, while finding your amusement in 'cultural missunderstandings' - but then comes the part that hits so hard, while the people that he is interacting with on screen are doing just that, the entire script is flipped, and all of the scenes are crafted to actually lay bare just how much western culture fails at trying to act civilized, while never coming even close to fulfill its moral virtues (guidelines we all live by) or pretensions. Showing, that they are - in fact - often conflicting (and ritualistic at most).
Which is why the climax of the first movie didnt work.
(It was just outrageous - so the movie was sure to have broad appeal.
And by having that - I guess it worked as social commentary ("What we'd all like to do..." on some level is impermissible, so we made Borat a hero, being able to do it under the guise of a cultural misunderstanding.)
But the one in the second movie did.
So if you've never laughed at societal conventions, you dont get the humor.
And if you never were interested in social commentary, you dont get how well crafted the interactions are. (The more subtle second layer.
)
So for all thats worth, right wing trolls lamenting on youtube or imdb comments, that they dont get whats so funny about scenes that hint at society failing to react to Covid appropriately - have a scene, where the running of the bulls in Pamplona, is mimicked, by a 'primitive country' - 'running from THE JEW', hinting at how propaganda works, and then realize, that they replaced the jew with a different subset of propaganda archetypes in the ending of the second movie.
When you come to those realizations, when you laugh at them, propaganda seizes to work. Thats also part of the brilliance.
edit:
Added more important stuff below..
Good comedy always doesnt just 'entertain', but holds a mirror to society. Which Sasha Baron Cohen does like no one else at this point.
This is also the reason you have comedians host the Oscars or the Golden Globes f.e. - because the people at those events, without conjecture, otherwise would entirely look like pretentious pricks.
So in those cases comedy holding a mirror to society is abused for corporate (/PR) interests.
(If you are german, the better example for this is Nockherberg - where the same principle is applied to political decision makers.) Which partly also are societies interests. So stuff like that is a right of passage for every 'seen as good' comedian.
The ones who dont comply (Bill Hicks, Sam Kinison, ...), get ostracized.
So in the end - conservatism always wins..
(Comedy serves societal interests, by confronting them, making people think about them, taking the piss out of them... Which aids reflection. And thereby (slow) progress through iteration.)
But both are needed (psychologically speaking
), the confrontation, and the 'its just silly' conjecture. Both serve a societal purpose.
Oh and btw. Chomskys critique of the leftwing liberal avant garde is exactly that - that it serves as a guideline of what is 'possible/permissible' even at the level of the outrageous, for society at large. But then Chomsky is, and always was a dissident at heart..
