Entertainment that makes unsuspecting members of the public the butt of the joke, such as Borat and Candid Camera, is cruel and unfunny, writes Marcel Berlins
The humour of humiliation has become distressingly popular, the success of the film Borat being the latest example. I disliked it and was angered by it. I admit to laughing quite often because parts of it are very funny, but those parcels of enjoyment were trivial when set against the film's essential cruelty. I am not referring to the jokes that send up national, ethnic or religious stereotypes and characteristics. There were plenty of those, some of which were in bad taste and offensive but often hilarious. Fine. My objection is to the exploitation of the naive, the trusting and the ignorant for the sake of a joke. What Borat did was to inveigle ordinary, harmless people into participating in what was promised to be a documentary; the real motive was to abuse their co-operation by making them objects of ridicule. It may be acceptable to exercise such methods to expose, in the public interest, someone's criminality, corruption or hypocrisy. To do so for the sake of cheap laughs is reprehensible.
Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's character, managed to extract from a few of his pathetic victims some loutish behaviour and racist remarks; they may not have been nice people, but that hardly justifies the effort put in to make them look silly. But by no means all his hapless victims could provide the excuse that they were unpleasant and somehow deserved their treatment. What criteria were used to decide those innocents were ripe for transformation into international laughing stocks? None, other than getting the laugh. That is not enough of a reason.
It all started with Candid Camera, a programme, both here and in the US, that thrived on playing practical jokes on people, and secretly filming their reactions. Most of the set-ups were relatively benign, the "fun" being dependent more on the victim's puzzlement (at finding, for instance, that his mailbox was talking to him, or that his new car had exploded - it was, of course, a look-alike) than on his humiliation.
In one famous episode that went too far, a woman hired by the programme stayed at the hotel where a couple were spending their honeymoon and persuaded the bride that she was having a torrid affair with the newly-wed husband. Many subsequent programmes have followed the Candid Camera formula, with minor variations. In the US, the format has reached the internet: there's a guy with a popular audio website who, when phoned by a call-centre salesman, pretends to be a homicide cop at the scene of a murder and convincingly treats the frightened caller as a prime suspect.
The usual defence to charges of calculated embarrassment or humiliation is that the victims subsequently agree to their discomfort being shown, and sign a form to that effect. Some do it for money, some - don't underestimate this motive - for fear of being seen as a bad sport, while others crave their moment of fame. Many, caught up in the excitement of the event, do not consider the consequences. For the Borat film, prospective victims signed a form agreeing to take part in a "documentary-style film". There are lawsuits flying around in which they claim they were misled - denied by the film company. But my point is a moral, not a legal one. It is wrong to use people in this way. It shows disrespect and it is not funny.