SOUL FOOD:’Borat’ is a tasteless, depressing and disturbing comedy at best

If the documentary “Jesus Camp” was “a Rorschach test for how [we] feel about religion right now,” as Eamonn Bowles of Magnolia Pictures, the film’s distributor, considered it, then the mockumentary, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” may well be a Rorschach test for how we now feel about each other.

The results, as far as I can tell, are less than heartening. And they have nothing to do with whether Sacha Baron Cohen’s video inkblot is funny.

Lots of things are funny — yet still meaner — than a badger strung up in a burlap bag.

Beyond its copious scatological humor (Mike Myers could do better blindfolded, with his mouth duct-taped and his hands bound behind his back) “Borat” has a mean-and-ugly factor that is nothing if not shameless — something not many reviewers have talked about. (In Newsweek, Devin Gordon did concede, “there’s no avoiding the fact that it is kinda mean.”)

If you haven’t yet seen this sweetheart of entertainment media and Hollywood, and you don’t know Sacha Baron Cohen from Adam’s house cat, here’s a bit of background.

Pre-Borat phenomenon, here in the U.S., the relatively unknown London-born comedian had gained a bit of popularity in Britain and later here, on HBO, with his “Da Ali G Show.” Which is where the faux-Kazakhstan-TV-journalist character, Borat Sagdiyev, was conceived.

The movie trails Borat as he treks from his home in Kusek (a fake place with a name some Israelis have claimed is a sound-alike word for the Hebrew slang for “vagina”) to America to report on our culture for the benefit of his homeland, Kazakhstan. The non-English language spoken in the film by Baron Cohen, who is Jewish, is however (mostly) Hebrew, not Kazakh or Russian.

(In fact, the town seen in the film is actually a Romanian village named Glod, which has angered citizens of both Glod and Kazakhstan.)

In New York, Borat is distracted from his assignment when, on a hotel television, he spots Pamela Anderson on “Baywatch.” Smitten, he launches a quest to California to make her his wife.

For 84 minutes, until Borat high tails it back to Kusek, viewers are shown a potpourri of lowbrow sketches (such as the male, nude-wrestling scene Baron Cohen referenced at the Golden Globes) and guerrilla-comedy-style interviews with various Americans, from a group of feminists to a promoter of rodeos.

Critics on the whole seem driven to find the film a place in Western canon. In reviews, allusions to philosophers (as in Cohen’s “Socratic irony” and the film’s “Platonic ideal of high-and-lowbrow”) and literary figures (as in “[T.S.] Eliot’s observation that, ‘The end of all our exploring/will be to arrive where we started’ ”) seem de rigueur.

So when the film showed up at the Warner Avenue Charter Centre Cinemas with a $2 (before 6 p.m.) admission, I had to give it a chance.

From the get-go, I found it sub-funny and disturbing: Borat showing off his sister Natalya, “fourth-best prostitute in Kazakhstan.” Borat bidding farewell from a horse-drawn carcass of a car, surrounded by townsfolk I suspect couldn’t possibly know what he was up to. As it turns out, few of Baron Cohen’s human punch lines did.

The residents of Glod — where there is no running water, no sewage system, little hope and only four villagers out of 1,400 with paying jobs — were told they were making “a documentary about their hardship.” Instead, they were passed off on the big screen as Kazakhstan rapists, incestuous lowlifes, and prostitutes.

The inadvertent actors were paid roughly $6. Baron Cohen’s American foils did somewhat better, if only financially.

For whether they curse him for his preposterous behavior (as he kisses male strangers and lets a hen loose on a New York subway) or they take a deep breath and try to remain polite (as he presents them with a bag of his feces or insults them and their spouses), the joke is on them.

Is there, after all, any appropriate way — a hip way, say — to respond to a boorish ingrate you suspect of being a fraud?

At times, the gag was added later. During Borat’s “interview” with several members of the Veteran Feminists of America, as one of the women is speaking, in the soundtrack we hear him thinking, “I could not concentrate on what this old man was saying.”

It may be biting social commentary about the way our culture views women (or it may be an endorsement). Either way, it’s willing to humiliate a real-life woman — without her informed consent — to make the point.

She was tricked into being part of the comedy. While hiding behind the cheap blue suit of a fictional character, Baron Cohen seized the best in people’s character in order to play them for fools.

The longer I watched “Borat,” the more I recalled a biblical story known as The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

Jesus, it’s said, told the story to “some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else.” It goes like this:

A Pharisee and a tax collector go to the temple to pray. “God, I thank you that I am not like other people — robbers, evildoers, adulterers — or even like this tax collector,” the Pharisee prays. But the tax collector beats his breast and says, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

To those who heard the story, Jesus explained, “This [tax collector], rather than the [Pharisee], went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

When I came across David Essex’s review of “Borat” the next day, I realized why the story had come to mind. The success of Baron Cohen’s gimmick, writes Essex, resides in “the viewer’s self-flattering assumption that he or she would not be thus taken in.”

In his review for New York Magazine, David Edelstein made this observation, “Most clowns have a wide streak of sadism, but it’s tempting to think of Sacha Baron Cohen as a sadist with a wide streak of clownishness.”

Edelstein seems to be the only critic who found the movie as depressing as I did. He likened it to “watching a bear-baiting or pig-sticking.”

He sees in it a sign that comedy is evolving, evolving “to the point that it bleeds into horror.”

And we’re buying it.