gimme a break

Joel Stein of the L.A. Times is annoyed because he didn’t get to be a real journalist while writing a story about the movie Borat, and he thinks every journalist who interviewed Sacha Baron Cohen in character took the easy way out.

But because comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s wild-and-crazy-foreigner-guy character is so amusing, and news is so boring, the “Today” show, Fox News, the Guardian, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Entertainment Weekly, Premiere and most local newspapers are willing to pretend that Borat is a real Kazakh reporter who put out a real documentary.   …

I wrote a three-page story about “Borat” for Time magazine, and my editors chose not to have me talk to Cohen in character. Instead, I asked the director and producer about what “Borat’s” candid camera says about Americans and whether the film is offensive to Jews, Gypsies or Kazakhs. Or to people who prefer not to see movies with human feces in bags.

Stein is upset because his important questions for Cohen didn’t get answered [emphasis mine]:

But the most important question in “Borat” — the one that makes it a cultural turning point — is about whether the act of tricking unsuspecting victims and sharing it with millions of people is cruel or funny. If privacy is a 20th century holdover, do we all deserve to have our inner nature outed by Colbert or “Jackass” or YouTube? The answer to that question about comedy — more than music, MySpace or Paris Hilton — is what cleaves the reality TV generation from their parents. And it’s too bad that Cohen, a Cambridge-educated, traditional, observant Jew, isn’t answering it.

Cohen isn’t answering the question?

Damn right he isn’t answering the question! It’s for him to perform and you, Mr. Stein—and the rest of us—to figure out. That’s why they call it performance art.