Even Scott Adams made up a fake country. That’s how much of a dick move it is.
4 Likes
Reads like America to me.
4 Likes
So don’t spend money on any Cohen product. Voting with dollars, I think it’s called.
BTW it’s pretty easy to invent jurisdictions that obviously parody an actual locale, same as building a cartoon / caricature rendition of such an actual place. Is employing stereotypes of any urban or rural place a “dick move”?
The UK? 
Wait i was thinking Douglas Adams lol
1 Like
If your comedy involves interacting in character with unsuspecting real people, you probably need to use a country that really exists.
If your comedy requires fomenting prejudice of a real country, maybe your comedy shouldn’t exist.
I wasn’t talking about whether it should exist but whether it could.
Even the Small Planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse probably exists in reality.
2 Likes
Cohen’s Borat character in particular seems more than a little off considering his Jewish background which is front and center in his text. Borat is a strongly antisemitic ‘primitive’ from a backward culture, it takes a conscious leap when following his comedic narratives to be able to separate the real Kazakhstan from the fictional.
An underlying assumption is that no one knows where or what Kazakhstan is. The yucks seem pretty hollow.
Personally I find it funny when US comedies take on Australian characters (being Australian) as they are generally a pastiche of a very broad stereotype, there is a contract between the comedy and the audience that these characters are absurd.
1 Like
Yah, Canadians also don’t mind when Americans poke fun at us. It’s the difference between punching up and punching down. Cohen doesn’t seem to understand this, given how many of his characters are stereotypes of oppressed groups.
1 Like
Well, I mean, what are we really going to say about Canadians?
They are just a bunch of suspiciously nice people with great health care! They eat a lot of maple flavored… delicious, maple flavored… uhhhhhmm… products, and they drink crappy, weak beer that is only slightly stronger and better than US beer!
Or how about “oooh! they feel so safe that a lot of people don’t lock their doors and they are so secure that they don’t spend the majority of their taxes on armies!” and “They are such bleeding hearts they have much better solutions to their societal ills and they just have to quietly sit there and be polite to us in their superior country and rub it in our faces!”?
Or something about how your donut shops are better and your bacon is tasty! Wait…
(Can I be a Canadian now please? I mean… I only live like one lake away! Please? I’ll learn to be nice, I swear!)
2 Likes
Protip: the whole “Canadian bacon” thing is a myth. We call that “back bacon” and we have regular bacon that we also call “bacon”. I’ll never know where Americans got that term from. 
Anyhoo, apologies if that wasn’t new information, and apologies in general. We’re all especially sorry about that whole “burning down the White House in 1812” thing.
1 Like
Huh. I thought Canadian bacon was streaky bacon? Shows what I know. So if Canadian bacon is back bacon, is streaky bacon just bacon? How does it work? (Of course, the best bacon is Ayrshire roll, cos that’s both kinds at once)
Canadian bacon is ham. Canadian carrots are great. And maple syrup? We drove from California to Alaska some time back and stopped at a First Nations store in remote BC. Maple syrup cost less than fresh milk. That’s nice!
Ham and back bacon are not the same thing. What I have seen Americans call Canadian Bacon is what me and all my Canadian friends and family call “back bacon”, which is different than ham. Other regions in Canada may differ, YMMV.
I had to look up “streaky bacon” and learned that the etymology of bacon cuts is complicated and very cultural. Near as I can tell, “streaky bacon” is actually what Americans and Canadians call normal bacon, and what Brits call American bacon. But nobody agrees on any of this.
2 Likes
FTFY
HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!!! 
2 Likes
I don’t ever remember hearing the term “American bacon”. Bacon is streaky, back or (rarely) middle. Back bacon is probably most common: if you buy a bacon roll or a fried breakfast, odds are it’ll have back bacon in it.
When I was a kid, streaky bacon prevailed: I have vague memories of coming across back bacon for the first time, and marvelling at how it had so much meat. But maybe my family was just tight.
The streaky bacon always had these weird little lumps of bone in it, too, just one or two, near one end of the rasher. And one day, just like that, they were gone. Like white dog poo.
Apologies, my wording was confusing. What I was trying to say is that what Brits call “streaky bacon” is just “bacon” in the US and Canada, as far as my googling seemed to indicate. But maybe it’s cut a little differently, since there aren’t weird little lumps of bone in it. Or maybe the internet has lied to me.
2 Likes
There aren’t here any more, either. And it may not have been bone: it may have been gristle or something. I assumed it was bone because I was very young and it was white and hard. The more I think about it, the more the idea it could be bone doesn’t make sense: what bones could they possibly be from?
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
