It's in public life that certain linguistic nogo areas have been established. I don't think that even in Ireland, where contempt for women is ingrained and culturally acceptable, a politician could get away with . . .

say . . . describing women TDs as slags or cows or fine things. Not in public. You never know, of course, how far populists will go; Ned O'Keefe has had a spot of bother in his day.

But anyone who thinks that voicing their sexism is a good idea should look at the awful example of Eoghan Harris. Harris was once taken seriously, hard though that is to believe now. But all that woman stuff . . . remember?

The Una gan guna sketch? The Mary McAleese is sexy but no one will vote for her rant? The I-invented-Mary-Robinson rubbish? All that was part of a whole career of getting everything wrong.

Private is different. Private prejudice does no harm as long as it's kept private.

But there's an area where correctness is somehow neither public nor private . . . where the power of what is prohibited is still allowed out for a snarl or a sneer . . .

and that's in comedy. I've been thinking about that after seeing the movie Borat, which everyone takes to be somewhat political . . . a critique of American life that's as much Michael Moore as Monty Python. The film comes right up to the borders of what it is acceptable to say on some subjects . . . subjects which have borders precisely because they touch on huge histories of badness and suffering. It has, for example, an anti-semitic theme which is supposed to be alright because Sacha Baron-Cohen is himself a Jew. But the late-20th century outlawing of anti-semitic speech isn't just a fad: it is a gallant attempt to anathematise or at least reign in the allowed Jew-hatred that led to prejudice, injustice and pogroms and finally to the Nazi attempt to destroy Jewishness altogether. Borat's 'joke' about a folk custom in his native village called 'The Running of the Jew' is a reference to the persistence of primitive, European antisemitism. But it left me uneasy. How many of the kids falling about laughing at it in the cinema in Brooklyn knew that that was the reference? How many of them just knew that you're not supposed to laugh at Jews being tormented and that this adult was releasing them from that prohibition?

The film doesn't have the kernel of plausibility that would make it an important satire. Who knows how many other things were tried? Who knows how many responses were cut out? Who knows how much stuff they shot till they got what they could use?

And it doesn't approach the real cutting edge. It doesn't, for example, show Borat annoying immigration officers; that wouldn't be funny at all. It doesn't show him standing up for the Palestinians at a Zionist meeting, or vice versa. When he becomes homeless and penniless it's not serious, but it is deadly serious, in real life. Nevertheless, the basic idea was brilliant, and the plot of getting to Pamela Anderson to marry her was brilliant and the physical slapstick is brilliant and on many levels the film is enormously enjoyable.

I start laughing every time I think of the camera panning away from the two naked Kazakhs in the lift to the tense face of the man in the corner who's pretending everything is normal. The only thing is . . .

where was the camera for that shot? And the camera operator? Mustn't it have been staged?

Deeper, however, than the new correctness, there is the old correctness, by which for centuries we have regulated our treatment of each other. There's such a thing, for example, as manners. There's fairness.

And it was in that area that I felt the Borat caper transgressed . . . very amusingly, but leaving a bad taste. He took what were . . . on the whole . . . decent American people who were . . . on the whole . . . doing nobody any harm, and he finagled them into making eejits of themselves. That was the basic joke.

Most of the Americans stuck it out with Borat long after an Irish person would have told him to eff off and they did it out of basic niceness and innocence. They're not familiar with smartyboots, undergraduate-type mockery. Their kindness made them sitting ducks. That's the main 'cultural learning of America we can make for our benefit' . . . that you can attack what is done to the world by America's power, and that's a legitimate target. But the personal sweetness of American manners . . . there's no reason for attacking that, and it has no political dimension.