If you’re like me, you love to watch two extremely hairy men wrestle naked until one all but smothers the other with his cavernous rear end. Such are the jaw-dropping, hilarious antics of Sacha Baron Cohen in his runaway hit, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” It’s a funny, funny, movie that makes you laugh when you really shouldn’t and forces you to look for reactions from the rest of the audience to make sure you’re not the only one who’s laughing at a giant, monstrous, villainous “Mrs. Jew” laying an egg that gets attacked by villagers so the Jew babies don’t hatch and kill us all.

I went to a viewing of Borat that was sold out for the entire day… at 12:45 on a Sunday. The sheer word-of-mouth promotion for this movie has been a phenomenon that the producers and distributors never saw coming. It has been hyped like no other movie I can remember (possibly more than Speed, Titanic, and The DaVinci Code combined). It’s a film that requires you to leave your sensitivity, up-tightness and general sense of personal offended-ness at the door. Or, safer yet, down the street. Because no matter who you are, there’s bound to be something in the movie that makes you say “Hey wait, that’s about me.”

The premise of the movie is as old as film itself: a Kazakh journalist makes a documentary of American culture, falls in love with Pamela Anderson while watching Baywatch, and treks across the country to meet her, all the while learning about all the things that make “the U S and A” wonderful. See? It’s a classic.

Sacha Baron Cohen plays Borat with an amazing sense of naiveté that allows him to get away with just about anything, taking everyone he meets down with him (these are real people, mind you…they’re not in on the joke). It’s funny, mean, and embarrassingly telling of our society. And while it’s easy to laugh at Borat prodding on a bigot who lampoons gay people with the sort of zeal you hope he reserves for thoughts and not actions, it’s kind of hard not to feel pretty bad for the antique shop owner who loses $250 of merchandise to Borat’s clumsiness. At times you even wonder if you should laugh at a man who is willing to test limits and take things as far as he can without getting beat up or arrested… or gape in astonishment

Of course, the controversy on the Kazakh side—that Borat personifies a nation of intolerant, mysoginistic, backward hicks who sleep with their sisters—has people in the South Asian country quoted as saying they would punch him square in the face if Cohen dared actually visit Kazakhstan. What they don’t understand is that the film isn’t really about Kazakhstan or their people at all. It’s about America and our latent, secret intolerance, misogyny and backward thinking that Borat draws out so well.

If you’ve seen Da Ali G Show (Cohen’s other creation) and you “get” it, you’ll laugh your self silly at Borat. But if like me you’re new to the character, be prepared to watch the entire movie with your eyes wide open, hand cupped firmly over mouth, stomach tightened with anxiety, funny bone in full effect. If nothing else, go see it so you know what everyone else is talking about. I guarantee you’ll laugh inappropriately.