Sacha Baron Cohen, Pamela Anderson Running time: 82 mins . . . . .

IMAGINE a movie in which the Irish were portrayed as racist antiSemitic gombeen men who didn't know their cutlery from a pitchfork. How would we react? Would we be insulted? Probably. So it's no surprise that Kazakhstan, a country larger in area than western Europe, is outraged by the mockumentary Borat . . . in which Sacha Baron Cohen poses as an outlandish provincial Kazakh TV reporter roaming America asking wildly inappropriate questions about the world's greatest superpower . . . and has made a formal complaint to President Bush.

Hopefully it'll prompt Bush to see the movie, because the main butt of Cohen's daringly anarchic humour is everything he represents.

It's so obvious from the start that Cohen's 'Kazakhstan' is a joke country . . . much like 'Bethlehem' in The Life of Brian . . . but the runaway success of Borat has generated genuine curiosity about the real Kazakhstan among people who never knew it even existed, with special features in most newspapers that may well turn it into a trendy tourist destination. Right from the opening clip in which Borat introduces us to his local village and its charming folk traditions . . . like the annual Running of the Jews . . . it's clear that his comic intent is off the radar screen in terms of political incorrectness.

Even the fact that Cohen is himself Jewish . . . formerly known as Ali G, the wannabe black rapper who asked an English policeman, "Is it coz I is black?" when he was forcibly removed from a protest march . . . hardly makes it safe to watch, which of course should be the acid test of all satire. Once he arrives in the US, Borat goes even further, dumping a dinner prepared for him by an endearing Jewish couple down the toilet because, with his inbred hatred of Jews, he thinks they must be trying to poison him. He goes into a gun store and asks advice on "the best gun to defend myself from Jews", eliciting the helpful answer, "That'd be a 9mm or a .45". He conducts a studio interview with feminists in which he asks: "Do you think that women should be educate?" Their shocked affirmative seems to puzzle him. "But is it not a problem that the woman have a smaller brain?" he says, and quotes research that proves conclusively that a woman's brain is "the size of a squirrel".

Some of the gags are just straight slapstick, such as when he gets interviewed on cable TV and strays into a weather forecast, or when he accosts male passers-by on Fifth Avenue causing them to recoil in horror and even run away when he tries to kiss them on both cheeks. Watching a re-run of Baywatch in his hotel, he falls in love with Pamela Anderson and drags his overweight producer across the States to Los Angeles to abduct her and subject her to a forcible marriage, as is the practice "in my country". But when he bluffs his way onto the rostrum at a Texan rodeo and, taking the mic, wins tumultuous cheers by praising the "great warlord Bush" and hoping that America "drinks the blood of every Iraqi", and then sings a ludicrous Kazakhstan version of the 'Star-Spangled Banner', you really begin to fear for his safety. Watch carefully in the background and you'll spot a cowgirl draped in the American flag fall over her horse in consternation.

Borat's commonplace racist, sexist and anti-Semitic prejudices push them to such outlandish extremes that even a bigot would find it hard not to recognise how ridiculous they are. Its comic craziness is contagious. Borat is the funniest 82 minutes you're likely to spend at the movies this year.