The Greeks pictured him with a gigantic erect phallus.  If you want to know what he looks like minus the erection, check out The Chronicles of Narnia, (though C. S. Lewis emasculated the goat-boy to suit his story’s Christian purposes.  And wrapped him in a scarf.  Jesus.)

The real Satyr is randy, raunchy and offensive.  Our word “satire” descends from the “satyr plays” performed at Greek and Roman festivals.  Greek playwright’s Aristophanes’s chorus strapped three-foot-long curved dildoes to their waists.  Roman playwright Catullus went further, inviting a senator he didn’t like to come eat his own shit off his strap-on.  (Hungry, Mr. Frist?)

Now, more than two thousand years later, Borat visits our own republic-turned-imperial dictatorship to invite Bob Barr to feast on cheese fermented from the milk of his wife and Alan Keyes to ponder being fisted.  It’s shocking, but traditional.  Classical, in fact.

Yet there is also a tenderness, a delicacy of detail woven through the crudeness, and these Borat borrows from Shakespeare.  Watch how scrupulously he doles out the crumbs of the aforementioned cheese with his fastidious little plastic knife and paper saucer.  Listen to the exquisitely gentle off-the-cuff “Tische” (Russian for “Shhh!”) he says to the cow gazing out the window of his village hut.  Likewise, Shakespeare’s Puck is more than a mere prankster.   He uses his last word in Midsummer Night’s Dream to apologize to the audience “if we players have offended.”   And earlier in the play, he is the one who says “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”  There is a melancholy wistfulness to his words.  Like Borat, he plays the role of a reporter (observing the humans stumbling about in the forest, and conveying what’s happening to the faery king.)  He both instigates trouble and stands back to watch what happens with pity.

Similarly, Borat’s finest moments happen when he stands back and observes.  Watch his face when the owner of the Virginia rodeo advises him to shave his mustache (to look less like a terrorist) and commends executing gays.  He has a look of horror and pity that needs no punch line.  The camera cuts away without comment.

Unlike Puck, Borat never addresses the ”Lord.”  But he does throughout the movie speak God’s language:  Hebrew (this according to “The Jerusalem Post.”  They would know.)  This is both a sophisticated and sophomoric joke, as is throwing dollar bills at the miniature Gregor Samsas in the Jewish-run bed-and-breakfast near Atlanta (whose little old lady and husband proprietors would have been amply clued in by the Hebrew he speaks with his fat, hairy “producer.”)

Of course, it’s the priapic qualities of Borat that hit you hardest, and these he gets from Greeks.  The giant swinging phallus of Pan is much in evidence during the nude wrestling scene (a sport invented by the Greeks) coquettishly hidden and simultaneously cleverly amplified by an elastic, whipping-around black bar.  Equally satyr-ical are the hairy thighs, and of course, the genuinely weird bent-kneed looping Borat gait that if you watch closely is precisely imitative of the backward jointed hind quarters of a goat. 

At this point, it’s almost superfluous to point out that “koh-za’” (the first two syllables of “Kazakhstan”) means “goat” in Russian.

So Borat is this mythical creature out of the woods.  He is disarming and endearing precisely because of the sense of his innocence, his pre-morality, pre-Christianity.  He antedates all that.  And we sense it.

Especially because as Americans, we think we ARE like him.

We are prancing innocent little Satyrs.  We may live in cities, but we’re really still on the frontier, in the woods, on the ranch.  Our follies are but jests.  We can collect Confederate memorabilia and somehow not be murderously evil racists.  We can spout misogynistic hate speech, and still cavort boyishly and guzzle beer.  We are free spirits.  We don’t need health care.  We will be forgiven for everything.

Borat’s biggest and also subtlest joke is the prejudice directed by American’s against him.  After all, almost any foreigner visiting the U. S. nowadays is bound to be better educated, better dressed, more cognizant of history, geography, plumbing and other social graces, as well as speak better English than the average American. 

Still our greatest flaws are our moral failings, our pretense at innocence when we should know better, which over a hundred years ago Kierkegaard predicted would lead to empty, over-inflated sentimentality (exemplified by our religion) or blind mechanized cruelty (exemplified by our wars.)

Of course we are no more innocent than Pamela Anderson is a virgin, and every day, footage from Abu Ghraib, New Orleans, or the White House briefing room serve as our home-made porno tapes.

Borat’s sad-savage skewering of our grand national innocence project makes him indispensable, especially now.  Just look at him dirty, disheveled, unshaven, obviously in deep trouble at the big-tent fundamentalist revival meeting, where instead of the Christian charity he desperately needs, he gets tongue-lolling Evangelical gobbledy-gook.

The movie is his payback.  No charity or gobbledy-gook here, just a Greco-Roman-Elizabethan kick in the pants.

Go see it many, many times and laugh knowing that your laughs join those of the audiences of Aristophanes and Catullus and Shakespeare, the laughs of more than two thousand years, laughs that may, just may, drown out the idiot cheers accompanying the speeches of tyrants.

Dmitry Portnoy can be reached at Dmitry@Fantasymoguls.com.