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Comment by uhhfcuvv | Hacker News Reader

> Kazakhstan is generally about one of the most secular countries in Eurasia)

Presumably this is one reason why Sacha Baron Cohen chose Kazakhstan to be Borat's hometown - if he had picked an Islamic country he'd be risking a beheading in the streets of London.

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He chose Kazakhstan because he was unlikely to meet anyone who knew about Kazakhstan or was from Kazakhstan. Originally the Borat character was an Albanian named Christo, but there were too many Albanians coming to London by the late 1990s.

Yet the cow-inside-house scene was filmed in Romania and attributed to Kazakhstan. Borat hired some gypsies, told them to put the cow in the house - the gypsies are simple people and would do any silly thing for a little money. Later, when they saw the movie, they were furious, claimed they've been duped.

> claimed they've been duped.

They likely were; I doubt Cohen told them exactly what the actual scene was going to be like.

I wonder why he didn't use a fictional country? That would insure that he wouldn't meet anyone from there. He could even pick one that has been used before, and put a couple references to that prior use, to give fans a bit of trivia to notice.

For example, use Franistan, and have a reference to the Maharincess of Franistan's 1952 visit to New York.

You lose part of the comedy value. As with his latest "Brothers Grimsby" or with "Brüno" and all the way to Ali G, Baron-Cohen likes to root his comedy in geographically-defined stereotypes. Occasionally the result latches on somewhat universal figures, but from the beginning it relies on viewers sharing Sacha's prejudices on this or that geographically-defined subculture.

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