Rarely has such a silly film been so clever.

For the uninitiated, Borat is a ‘mockumentary’ charting the journey across America of the Kazakhstani TV reporter Borat Sagdiyev (played by the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen) in pursuit of ‘cultural learnings’ – and, latterly, Pamela Anderson.

He is misogynistic, homophobic and obsessively anti-Semitic. To the understandable fury of its government, the film portrays Kazakhstan as a nation of filthy, barbarous and poverty-stricken peasants.

Altogether, Borat is 90 minutes of toe-curling embarrassment. It’s funny and it’s silly. But it’s also clever, and asks some uncomfortable questions.

First, there is the question of civilisation. Borat is an obviously primitive caricature – yet the film’s most shocking lines come not from him but from the Americans from whom he is supposedly learning. There are the students whose attitude to women makes Borat look like Germaine Greer; an ageing cowboy who talks enthusiastically about hanging homosexuals; a pastor who walks out of a dinner party when a prostitute walks in. Who is civilised here? Who is in a position to offer ‘cultural learnings’?

Then there is the question of limits. Some of Baron Cohen’s victims are nasty and offensive, but does that justify the way he exposes them and holds them up to ridicule? Likewise, Kazakhstan is a real place with real people. Is it right to deride it in this way, even if only in jest? How far is too far?

Third, there is the question of tolerance. Like Baron Cohen’s other characters, Ali G, the ‘king of bling bling’, and the gay Austrian fashion guru Bruno, Borat is deliberately ‘foreign’. Superficially nice, each is really ignorant and unpleasant. Yet because they are different, people tolerate them. Borat, for example, walks into a gun shop and asks which is the best weapon to kill a Jew. ‘A 9mm or a .45,’ the salesman replies without hesitation. How far should we make excuses for other people’s cultural presuppositions? Where is the limit to tolerance?

Last, there is the question of judgement. It’s easy to laugh at Borat’s dupes, but I wonder how I would fare if an invisible audience was scrutinising everything I did and said. Perhaps the Last Judgement will be one, long Borat-style film, in which all our own faults – our casual abuses, quietly nurtured hatreds and thoughtless prejudices – are exposed.

Let’s hope that the viewers are sympathetic.

Nick Spencer