Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry threatened legal action Monday against a British comedian who wins laughs by portraying the central Asian state as a country populated by drunks who enjoy cow-punching as a sport.
Sacha Baron Cohen, who portrays a spoof Kazakh television presenter Borat (above) in his “Da Ali G Show,” has won fame ridiculing Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth largest country yet still little known to many in the West, on British and U.S. channels.
Cohen appears to have drawn official Kazakh ire after he hosted the annual MTV Europe Music Awards show in Lisbon earlier this month as Borat, who arrived in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle.
“We do not rule out that Mr. Cohen is serving someone’s political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way,” Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman Yerzhan Ashykbayev told a news briefing.
“We reserve the right to any legal action to prevent new pranks of the kind.” He declined to elaborate.
Cohen’s earlier jokes about the Central Asian state include claims that the people would shoot a dog and then have a party, and that local wine was made from fermented horse urine.
This, of course, is not the first time that Cohen has rubbed someone the wrong way with the Borat character. And we’re still anticipating complaints from the Canadian Anti-Defamation League over Ali G’s recent sitdown with Steve Nash
Some gratitude. This man has single handedly jump-started the industry of Making The Bull Explode.
I believe there was a piece in the Guardian last year in which a number of Kazakhstanians were shown Borat clips…and most agreed that Cohen was, in fact, mocking the English and Americans. Which isn’t to say that that the Foreign Ministry isn’t entitled to be offended.