Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

I'm watching, with my 13-yearold, clips of the film which have been posted on 'journalist' Borat Sagdiyev's spoof website. He arrives at a premiere of the film with 30 members of his extended family on a mule-drawn wagon also containing barrels of his favourite tipple, fermented horse urine (which, reassuringly, turns out to be apple juice from Tesco).

It's when the jokes wade into the minefields of anti-Semitism, homophobia and misogyny that the laughter becomes more to do with the outrageousness of what is being said, rather than the pure slapstick of those other scenes. It's not just that my son would be hard-pressed to point out Kazakhstan on a world map and thinks a pogrom is something on the telly. It's my own response to Borat's claim on the website that a favourite pastime among the peasants of this allegedly goat-loving, woman-caging, gypsy-stoning, dog-shooting nation is something called The Running of The Jew.

I laugh. Because it's so outrageous. And funny.

To go from the ridiculous . . . Borat . . . to the highlyintellectual . . .Freud . . . the world's most quoted psychoanalyst said, in 1905, that the reason we laugh at jokes is because they are like dreams.

They satisfy our unconscious desires, releasing us from inhibitions, allowing us to express instincts that would otherwise remain hidden.

So what does that say about me, and others who fancy themselves as liberal-minded, yet find Borat hilarious? Is saying, 'I know I shouldn't laugh, but. . .' as bad as 'I'm not a racist, but. . .'?

My safety valve is that Baron Cohen is Jewish . . . a practising Orthodox Jew . . . and the son of an Israeli mother. So that makes this all okay.

Doesn't it?

Those who are most definitely not laughing are the Kazakhs.

The population of this Central Asian republic is 15 million . . .

that's a lot of stony faces. The country's first citizen, the president, is so enraged with the depiction of Kazakhstan that he has threatened to sue Baron Cohen, and also issued a personal complaint to US president George Bush when the film premiered in the States. The US release has been cut from a projected 2,000 cinemas to just 700, amid reports that this kind of humour doesn't translate well to an American audience. "Our research showed it [the film] was soft in awareness, " sniffed one US distributor. Vitriolic ads were also taken out by the Kazakhstan government in the New York Times, charting all that's positive about the former Soviet republic, before the ambassador gave up and halfheartedly invited Baron Cohen to pay the republic a visit. If 'Borat' ever decides to take him up on the offer, he could well suffer the fate of the subject of one of his spoof peasant songs: 'Throw the Jew Down the Well'.

You wonder if any of this stuff qualifies for the competition set by President Ahmendinejad? The Iranian leader has launched a Middle East search for the best 'Holocaust joke'. Whether or not Tehran is resounding with belly laughs, the joke is that others have beaten the president to it.

Comedian Sarah Silverman . . .

who happens to be Jewish, as well as American, does Holocaust jokes, as well as Martin Luther King jokes, Aids jokes and abortion jokes. You don't have to journey far to set your liberal credentials against your funny bone, either. Our own stand-up comic, Tommy Tiernan, in one routine, suggests that the Holocaust really "could have been a lot worse" and imagines aloud what would have happened if Hitler had been forced to take Irish step-dancing classes as a child. The LA Times, in a review of this, among other edgy stuff performed by Tiernan, was lavish in its praise during his US tour this year. The paper described the Navan man as "the uncensored, politically incorrect voice that we all work vigilantly to suppress . . . in other words, a highly sensitive human Geiger counter for the outlandishness surrounding us".

Iconic American '60s comic Lenny Bruce regularly took audiences beyond the boundaries.

In one routine, he suggested that by regular and repeated use of words that are taboo and offensive . . . saying 'nigger' for black people, 'kikes' for Jews, calling the police 'pigs' . . .

makes them become meaningless and inoffensive. Stand-up is not just there to entertain, but to tell the truth through comedy, to expose hypocrisy and challenge us, he said.

Edgy, uncomfortable, just-this-side-ofoffensive material surrounds us much more now than in Bruce's era. Ricky Gervais had a sketch in Extras with a dying cancer patient;

Catherine Tate's latest character is a workingclass mother parading her gay son round Belfast.

Shazia Mirza is arguably Britain's most well-known Muslim stand-up and used to perform in full hijab dress. She has one of the most famous opening lines on stage: 'My name is Shazia Mirza. At least, that's what it says on my pilot's licence." We are laughing with Mirza, not at her.

Irish people are sophisticated enough to get the joke, can tell the difference between something that pokes fun at racism, as opposed to a joke that is simply racist?

Well, not exactly. Shalini Sinha is a columnist who writes in the Irish media on social and multicultural issues.

"I don't know if Irish people are that aware of how racism works.

It's important that the individuals in charge of producing the media are aware, and that includes comedians. I think comedy can be helpful . . . particularly if that comedian has experienced racism.

He or she can bring you into that world, show it through their eyes. I saw a British-Asian stand-up comic recently and he was talking about how the English have this fear that black people will take over their world. He pointed out that Asians run all of these corner shops which stock absolutely everything you could ever need.

Particularly in a disaster. And he pointed out how smart and sensible these people are. It wasn't racist, it was just very human, and also very funny.

"It's much more dangerous when you have a politician saying something untrue, because people will take it as fact because it comes with the stamp of authority.

Comedy is a different context. I wouldn't want to stop comedians experimenting. When they get it right, it's like a breath of fresh air.

Comedy opens up racism, because people don't know how to talk about it. It can seem as if there is no safe place for discussion as judgements are made so quickly . . .

'you're a racist', 'you're a woolly liberal'. So many people don't get the chance to debate it. Comedy, by its very nature, is about stepping over the boundaries, and it can be good if a comic goes a little over the top and gets people thinking about these issues when they leave the theatre."

Comedian Dave McSavage regularly forsakes the relative safety of the club for the open warfare of the city streets. A lot of his material sends up our inflated view of ourselves as a nation, often inviting the abusive attention of the capital's more colourful characters up close . . . so close that when his verbal attack fails on occasion, McSavage has chased a number of them flailing his guitar.

Part of the appeal of this kind of comedy is the unlikely element of fear . . . what is he going to say? How are some people going to react? As regards our sophistication in matters racist, McSavage says he loves the way we are shocked here about how some comedy appears to be laughing at others. The Irish are practically primitive compared to those from nations that are regularly lampooned.

Which is not to say he has time for self-censorship or kow-towing to the thought police. Political correctness is just a phrase someone came up with, he says. It has no relevance to real life.

"A lot of the stuff people laugh at are the things they are afraid to say. Good comedy is like a portal for all of that rubbish of political correctness. It's a release for people just to be able to laugh.

"So much depends on the mood, the context, if the audience likes the person who is talking. If someone comes in, is in a bad mood, has their mind made up, then they will be more judgmental.

It's all down to the skill of the comedian, how well he can charm the audience, get it on his side."

On any given day, if you were to take a lot of McSavage's material out of context, you could say it was racist, he admits. But the people who are making that accusation are putting their own fears and prejudices on everyone else. That is their problem. "I do a very good Dublin accent, but I also do a very good Indian one. I perform an exchange that I witnessed in real life, as part of the act, using both accents. For someone to accuse me of being racist shows they are intellectually stunted because they can't even acknowledge that such a scene can happen. People who shout 'racist' are like the extreme end of the same spectrum . . . wishy-washy liberals that keep humanity at a distance.

A true racist is someone very evil . . .

and I don't believe there are that many of them out there. If I am making fun of someone close to me, on a personal level, it's genuinely funny because all of that 'sensitive' bullshit is out of the way.

We need to be able to laugh at life.

A sense of humour is a sign of an intellectually healthy human being."

Confidence allows a nation laugh at itself. Maybe prosperity has something to do with it, too.

For Ireland, that's something relatively new, compared to the economically repressed days of the '70s and '80s. Back then when the likes of Bernard Manning or Jim Davidson made cracks about thick Paddies, oh, how we didn't laugh. A bit like the government of Kazakhstan at the moment, you could argue. It's worth considering that Borat's national hierarchy of 'God, man, horse, dog, woman, then rat' is missing something crucial: the Central Asian republic is rich in oil reserves . . . the most prized commodity in the world.

The man behind Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen, rarely steps out of character to speak publicly, but one remark is telling about the provocative nature of his comedy which he says is "a dramatic demonstration of how racism feeds on dumb conformity as much as it does on rabid bigotry".

Great comedy is back where it belongs, then . . . pushing boundaries, being provocative, making us nervous and uncomfortable, making us laugh.

Perhaps the butt of Borat's jokes is not the alleged backwardness of a former Soviet state, after all.

The target might be liberal complacency.

Glass of fermented horse urine, anyone?